Alcatel-Lucent Improves IPTV Network Architecture

Alcatel-Lucent announced improvements to its Triple Play Service Delivery Architecture (TPSDA) that includes:

• Increased capacity and density
• Policy enforcement with per-subscriber resolution
• The equivalent of 19.2 million queues per telecom rack, which enables more fine-grain service control to ensure each service is delivered with the appropriate Quality of Experience (QoE) and uses network resources in the most efficient manner
• PPPoE termination, which facilitates the smooth migration of legacy networks to TPSDA
• A reporting and analysis system which provides tools to warehouse, aggregate and process per subscriber application-level statistics

Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA has been successful and fifty service providers globally have adopted it along with Alcatel-Lucent products, including AT&T in the U.S. TPSDA is providing more granular control over flows in order to assure QoE. Zeugma is attacking the same problem with its new system.

These architectures will clearly be important for insuring QoE for VoIP and mobile services. It is still not clear to me that it will be effective for IPTV traffic as IPTV moves from a broadcast/multicast approach to an on demand/unicast approach. Unicast TV will saturate these networks and be quite difficult to manage using packet based techniques.