The horrors of Telco TV emerge

IMPLEMENTING IPTV is a nightmare waiting to happen, according to MetaSolv Market Director Rajeev Tankha.

MetalSolv has been talking to the first companies around the globe that have started deploying IPTV and the statistics Tankha rattled off on the show floor at GlobalComm 2006 here in Chicago sounded like a commercial for the cable industry.

"TV has been around for 40 years, but the telco haven't been delivering it that long," Tankha said. Some companies have seen a 100 percent order fallout as customers have signed up, waited for their service to be delivered by a promised date, and never had either show up or it never worked properly. Average time to get an IPTV installation up and running is around five hours. Many companies do well in operational trials, but scaling up to serve the full customer base turns up more headaches.

And once it's up, that's only the beginning of the nightmare. IPTV companies are getting an average of 6 to 8 phone calls a year per customer with complaints the service doesn't work; however, the more typical customer will call 3 to 4 times before getting fed up and pulling the plug on the service.

It takes about four truck-rolls to get a broken IPTV connection fixed. At $250 a call for labor, the provider ends up at $1000 in the hole. Since IPTV services are being competitively priced at $50 a month, doing the math gets to be very ugly.

One company in Canada had rolled out its IPTV service and the telco technician in charge did an upgrade at midnight - after all, who watches TV at midnight? Turns out the service window interrupted the last ten minutes of “Survivor.” Massive numbers of customers cancelled.

More ominously, the "triple play" turns into a "grand slam". Phone companies are targeting their sweet-spot customers with voice, video and data. However, angry customers who end up cancelling IPTV service decide to be vengeful and take their data and phone service to another company as well.

Why is IPTV so miserable? The challenge is working all the little bits together in a seamless fashion, including broadband, IP set top boxes and their software, TV sets, and the home LAN. Phone companies don't control the telly or the indoor wiring on the home LAN, a problem the cable companies don't have since they use that ugly but reliable coax cable they trenched in a couple of decades ago.

MetaSolv's solution to this is (of course) their OSS software to unite stovepipe silos of configuration information, better installation and management and all sorts of wonderful things. The phone companies themselves have also started reaching into the toolbox of technology for things like distributing IPTV over existing coax cable and powerline technology to boost the home LAN, but even those improvements may not be enough to smooth out the growing pains of a technology with too many moving parts. µ