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Carrier Services
Telekom Austria: “IPTV Teething Problems Solved”
Will Launch Full Marketing Campaign This Month
by Ken Wieland
In March 2006, Telekom Austria had an IPTV ‘soft launch’
in Vienna. No marketing, no fanfare. And that, according to
Helmut Leopold – Telekom Austria’s MD for platform
technology – has enabled it to identify key shortcomings in its
IPTV offer before full-scale launch.
“We were getting very high STB [set-top box] return rates –
around ten percent – with customers saying the service didn’t
work,” said Leopold in conversation with
Telecommunications® at BBWF. “There was nothing wrong
with the STB but rather it was an education problem over
installation. We’ve now resolved that. We’ve had to train up
our customer support staff and change our internal processes
to make sure that we are ready to go to market with the
service.”
With that work well underway, Leopold says that Telekom
Austria is now ready to make a full marketing assault on rival
cable TV operator UPC this month. In Vienna, which has
800,000 households, UPC has a 75 percent market share of
broadband connections.
“We’re targeting the high-end customer with high quality
digital TV and putting an emphasis on real-time VoD,” says
Leopold. “That’s something that the cable and satellite
operators can’t do.”
Using Alcatel’s Open Media Platform for the
IPTV ‘middleware’, Leopold says he is ‘extremely happy’ that
he has got a stable and scalable system in place. He is
dismissive of the importance of the ‘channel zapping’
functionality enabled by Microsoft TV’s software. “If it takes 1-
1.5 seconds to switch a channel, that’s absolutely fine. Not
having anything shorter than that is definitely not an IPTV
showstopper,” he says.
For the time being, Leopold believes that ADSL2+ is ‘more
than sufficient’ for its triple-play offer, at least to the 2009-
2010 period. By that time Leopold expects a wider variety
IPTV applications, as well as HDTV, to be in greater demand.
“We’re currently looking at the business models surrounding
Fiber-to-the-Curb and talking to local authorities about how
best to organize that,” says Leopold.
As Telekom Austria’s timetable for FTTN investment is not so
urgent, there have been no headline-grabbing disputes
between the regulator and the Austrian incumbent over how to
regulate a new round of broadband investment.
Nevertheless, Leopold sees this as a critical issue. “The right
framework that makes [fibre access] investment sustainable
needs to be found,” says Leopold. “A lot more work needs to
be done by regulators to make the unbundling processes
easier and to establish how the costs are going to be worked
out on a fair basis for everyone.”
Leopold believes that the stance taken by EU Telecom
Commissioner Viviane Reding – who does not favour giving
incumbents a ‘regulatory holiday’ on their FTTN investment –
is both unfair and potentially very complicated to implement
(different parts of the local loop, fiber and DSL, needing to be
either unbundled or leased with different associated cost
structures).
“There is a danger that Reding will actually slow down
broadband growth in Europe,” says Leopold. “One of the
reasons why broadband is developing so fast in the US and
Asia is because operators are not bogged down by lots of
rules and regulations.”
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