UTStarcom is seeing on average that 60 percent of the IPTV viewing in its Shanghai deployment uses unicast video on demand content. It expects that this percentage will grow next month due the availability of on demand viewing of all of the events at the Beijing Olympics.
The network it has deployed in Shanghai supports both multicast and unicast, but there are some areas where only unicast is available. There are areas that are served only by an ATM network that is not well suited to multicast. Shanghai Telecom often does not deploy IPTV services in these areas, but when it does, it will provide both broadcast as well as on demand content using unicast. There is no problem offering multicast IPTV in areas served by an IP netowrk.
UTStarcom acknowledges that the extensive use of unicast will generate a significant load on the metro aggregation network. It stated that this has not been a problem as yet.
Shanghai is the largest IPTV that I have found with such high usage of unicast on demand IPTV services. My guess is that the traffic loads that this service has generated have not been a significant problem yet because the percentage of broadband subscribers using IPTV services is still quite low. I believe things will change as IPTV penetration grows.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment