China Telecom Selects Vendores

China Telecom announced the companies that its provincial operators should use for their IPTV services. For systems contracts, ZTE , UTStarcom, and Alcatel-Lucent were chosen.

For standard-definition set-top boxes ZTE, UTStarcom, Coship, Motorola, Huawei, Postcom, Sunniwell, Alcatel-Lucent, Yuxing, 30 Kaitian and Changhong. The provincial operators should give preference to these companies in the order that they are listed.

For high-definition set-top boxes ZTE, UTStarcom, Alcatel-Lucent, Postcom and Changhong.

The prices for terminal equipment have been set and the provincial operators are not allowed to renegotiate prices.

This should clear the way for China Telecom's provincial operators to ramp up their IPTV efforts. This is likely to significantly accelerate the IPTV services in China, which has basically been limited to the Shanghai area until now.

ZTE IPTV System

I was at the ZTE analyst meeting in Shenzhen, China on March 25 and 26. ZTE was quite serious about its telco IPTV system. It offers an open system that combines ZTE and third party components, including:

• Headends from Tut Systems (now part of Motorola), Optibase, Tandberg TV, envivio, and Thomson
• Video On Demand Servers from ZTE
• Middleware from ZTE
• Content Security from ZTE, Irdeto and Verimatrix
• Set-top boxes from ZTE, Sunniwell, and Yuxing

ZTE stated that its systems are in more than 20 deployments and trials and are currently supporting one million telco IPTV subscribers, including

• China (with 50 percent market share according to ZTE's numbers)
• Free Internet, Thailand
• VNPT Vietnam
• Belorussian Telecom
• Progroup, Estonia
• STC, Saudi Arabia
• Emcali, Columbia
• CanTV, Venezuela

ZTE's basic business strategy is to focus on developing countries, especially China and India. This is a good strategy, since this is where the new opportunities are coming from.