I have moved, on average, about once every 8 months over the course of my adult life. Up until about August of 2007, I had somehow managed to weasel out of ever paying for residential internet service. As I’ve been married a few years now, my wanderlust has been kept in check, but the frequency at which we have moved (I like to think we’re “upwardly mobile”) hasn’t decreased much.

These factors have lead me to be a customer or user of just about every major internet provider in the country.  I’ve helped design the initial layout for TCA Cable (which later became Cox Communications), as well as having been a user of Comcast, Southwestern Bell, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner, as well as a number of mid-level internet providers who’s names escape me at the moment. I’ve used everything from dial-up, to ISDN, to DSL, to cable, to wide-area WiFi to this one time when I actually had my own microwave connection to the internet.

These Are A Few of my Favorite Internet Connections…

There have been three times where I was absolutely in love with my internet service.  The microwave connection has to be the absolute best, as it maintained service during a period of time where there were virtually more hurricanes than grains of sand in Florida.

When I was but a teenage punk working for my first adult tech gig at TCA Cable, the virtues of being the network admin meant I had a 13 megabit connection to my home, and was one of the first people in the city with faster than dialup access.  I was thrilled with the service, needless to say (but then I may have been a little biased).

In modern times (that is to say, up until a month ago), I had AT&T’s UVerse service. I loved it.  I had a 29 megabit connection to my home that afforded me access to exactly one gazillion channels of TV content and a blazingly fast internet connection. The only reason I don’t have the service today is that I moved just down the road about four blocks into Verizon territory, and they insist that I pay a $400 deposit (on top of whatever startup charges exist for the service) just to have the privilege of using their service.

There’s a whole story there in how absurd that is, but I’ll probably save that for another time; there’s a different absurdity I’d like to bring up with my current network access provider Time Warner: at what point will they switch to IPTV?

Don’t get me wrong – I have a pretty fast connection due to the fact that all my neighbors use Verizon, and I’m the only kid on my block with a cable connection again (so I’m not sharing this node with, well, anyone according to the cable installer). Knowing how cable technology works, as I do, and having seen IPTV work in the cases of Verizon FiOS and AT&T UVerse, I’m left to wonder why we are still stuck with the antiquated delivery method cable companies choose to shove network and cable programming at us (and why, as a result, we’re stuck with such low amounts of bandwidth to the home).

I Took a Class Once On This, So I’m an Expert

Whenever our internet shop back in the late 90s was in the process of being purchased by a regional cable company, they got a guy from the cable side to explain the nuance of the technology we were going to be using to deliver data to our customers.

Essentially, using analog cable TV equipment (which was the dominant form of equipment at the time), you could transmit a theoretical 91 channels of programming to the consumer, although in practice you were generally able to only stuff about 60-70 channels in there that weren’t hopelessly interfered with by something or another.

What they discovered in 1989 (but wasn’t really implemented until about 1998 on a broad scale) was that there was a theoretical 1,000 channels that you could deliver if you used MPEG compression to send digital signals down the cable line and had a converter box uncompress them. It followed, then, that if you could send digital video, you could also send a dummy pipe of information up and down one of those analog channels.

That’s what we were in charge of.  At our cable company, they took one of the channels off the lineup (probably ESPN-8, “the ocho”) and turned it into the data channel.  Using the top of the line equipment available to us in that age, we were able to deliver a full 13 megabits up and down per node (and per home, in theory, though not in practice).

That’s Great, but What Does That Have To Do with IPTV?

Given current technology’s progression, using that single channel and modern compression techniques, cable providers are able to deliver more than double that amount of bandwidth to the node (and, again, in theory to the home). The last mile problem has been decisively solved.

If one single channel is able to deliver to me 30 megabits (up and down) of data, why aren’t the cable companies using all available channels to deliver digital video content as well as offering data plans that are comparable to the ones we see in Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan?

If we conservatively estimate what the average consumer could see in bandwidth to the home base on what’s technically feasible, we’re still looking at impressive numbers.

Let’s say that the average cable company is only able to sweep their network to get an effective 60 analog channels working at all times, and they limit the maximum amount of bandwidth to any single consumer on the highest tier to about half of what’s available per node (which is about what they do now)… you’re talking about getting nearly a gigabit of bandwidth available to each consumer. 

Are you telling me that with bandwidth like that at the average consumer’s disposal, they wouldn’t be happier customers (and, incidentally, more willing to pay that exorbitant $400 deposit and not uncommon $100-150 a month bill)? 

Here’s Why Unifying Communications Makes Sense for Consumers and Providers

AT&T understands that unifying (I think they call it “bundling”) services makes sense – they’re able to upsell you on crap you don’t need but now are suddenly able to justify. 

I never would have purchased a DVR (having always preferred to build my own) if it didn’t have so many handy features with the UVerse service (like playing shows from any room in the house, custom in-DVR applications, and the ability to play my computer’s music library in any room).

I can’t pull up the graphics for it now since I’m no longer a subscriber to AT&T, but they were even pitching me on a kitchen gadget that allowed me to watch on-demand content as well as have a digital cook book at my fingertips. What? Yeah, something that goofy, but it only added a couple of tenspots to my monthly bill, and I almost considered buying it.

AT&T gets a pretty bad consumer rating in most of their services (mostly their wireless), but their UVerse is pretty highly rated – and this is why.  They’re able to deliver a wider range of services  and products over what is quite frankly an inferior pipeline into your house than what the cable company owns.

Why else does it make sense? IPTV reduces load on the connection provider’s upstream internet connection.  I remember having talks exploring this topic just before I left TCA Cable – we wanted to prove to our new corporate overlords that 13 megabits was enough bandwidth to deliver streaming video to the consumer (and thus, a form of primitive IPTV). We rigged up a demo and showed how we could service an entire node with bandwidth intensive applications like that while still only partially utilizing a T1 connection to do the serving.

How did that work?  The system serving up the video to consumers only needs to download one copy of the video (or whatever else is being broadcast), and the internal consumer network takes up the load.  That means to serve up 5000 simultaneous streams of the Superbowl, for instance, only one stream needs to be active going in and out of the cable provider.

This is an opportunity that has been staring cable providers in the face for more than a decade. For the life of me, I can’t understand the fiscal motivation behind inhibiting innovation this badly – but I do know that if they’re not careful, AT&T and Verizon are going to put them to shame with their products and services and ultimately eviscerate the cable company’s bottom lines.