ABSTRACT
With the emergence of IP services, real-time video on demand (VOD), broadband TV, and video-over-IP networks have come to be known popularly as IPTV. IPTV is a suite of services consisting of digital TV, VOD, VoIP, and Web/e-mail all in one. Although it resembles cable TV, the two are not identical. Cable TV picture quality is still better than what is offered by IPTV. However, IPTV offers an interactive experience and comes with multimedia streaming features such as play, pause, fastforward, and rewind. These features are absent in traditional cable TV offerings. IPTV, however, requires broadband access and needs a bandwidth of between 2 Mbps/channel and 8 Mbps/channel. At 8 Mbps/channel, its quality is comparable to low-end HDTV. HDTV typically requires about 20 Mbps/channel and in times of channel changes, it requires about 40 Mbps/channel for two channel streams. Hence, a typical household requires at least 40 Mbps bandwidth, which in today’s terms is best provided with optical networks. A household with two or three TV sets therefore needs about 100 Mbps for them to concurrently run IPTV services.
