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NewsGlobe: Today's News
Mountain Telephone prepares for IPTV
Kentucky cooperative upgrading to 10 Gbps infrastructure
by Jim Barthold
Mountain Telephone surely knows what its subscribers want.
The West Liberty, Ky. cooperative is owned by its 17,000 or so
subs, so it was easy to decide to add IPTV and VoIP to a list
of services that will be provided as the carrier upgrades its
network in Bath, Elliott, Menifee, Morgan and Wolfe counties.
“We had needs of upgrading some equipment that was
getting a lot of age to it and … with the need to migrate to a
softswitch and anticipate being able to offer voice-over-IP
along with the IPTV, we felt like the time had come that it was
logical for us to begin this journey,” said Alan Gillum, general
manager of Mountain Telephone. “Rather than start with
maybe what might be enough capacity to get us by for an
initial brief period, we chose to go ahead and go to the 10 gig
scenario in a belief that over a decade’s time it would be
ultimately less expensive.”
To deliver these subscriber services, Mountain is deploying a
Fujitsu multiserver provisioning platform that should also
serve as the base for future upgrades, which, Gillum admits,
will become necessary.
“We anticipate it will take us two to five years to get this fully
implemented. By that time we probably would be ready to
seriously look at fiber-to-the-home as the next step and take
us on into the next generation beyond what the IPTV-over-
copper can do for us,” he said.
The first phases of construction will in mid-2008 and consist
of a 10-gig fiber ring feeding 18-kilofoot ADSL2+ copper lines
to residences and businesses. Gillum predicted this
configuration will deliver IPTV to about half the co-op’s
subscribers, although high definition television will be more
problematic and probably restricted to those closer to the
switch.
IPTV and even VoIP, he said, were only side reasons why the
co-op decided on the system upgrade.
“We will be designing a network that will give us a much
greater redundant capability and response to homeland
security issues,” he said. “We would not have any one spot in
our network … that we would have everything bottlenecked
through and we could quickly reroute most of our
connectivity.”
The subscriber services, of course, are bigger attention-getters than the day-to-day system operation and of more import to the end users.
“We certainly feel that our subscribers were anxious for IPTV,”
Gillum said.
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