Confirms strong growth for powerline-based IPTV distribution in Europe.
December 18, 2007 – Comtrend Corporation, a leading supplier of powerline equipment for IPTV home distribution, announced today that it shipped more than 800,000 powerline adapters for IPTV applications during 2007, confirming recent independent analysis that shows strong demand for powerline technology, as a result of an explosion in subscriber growth. According to the DSL Forum, year-to-year European IPTV subscriber growth reached 231%, adding almost 3.5 million subscribers.
“The market for powerline-based IPTV distribution will keep growing as current deployments add subscribers and more operators launch IPTV services. Comtrend feels that the strong growth rates powerline-based solutions are experiencing could increase even further if powerline technology is standardized” ? informed Harold Fitch, Comtrend’s General Manager for Europe and South America. The industry understands the need for a standard and organizations like the IEEE and the ITU have launched initial work that may lead to an industry standard. Recently, some IEEE P1901 members began the long process of considering a specification for a draft baseline proposal. However, this specification is not based on interoperability, a key requirement for IPTV operators.
“If a standard does not guarantee interoperability it will fail to gain market traction and risk becoming irrelevant. Our current powerline solution works very well, so a standard that does not guarantee interoperability will not provide any added value”, Harold Fitch added.
“Our customers are interested in a technology that can deliver a self-installable, remote-managed solution that complies with IPTV’s throughput requirements. The success demonstrated by winning several of the most important IPTV deployments in Europe confirms that our current powerline product can deliver exactly what our customers require.” Comtrend’s PowerGrid DH-10PF Powerline Ethernet Adapter’s inherent flexibility and ease of use aids telecom operators to flawlessly distribute their IPTV service around the home. According to Harold Fitch Comtrend’s GM, “Consumers do not usually connect their television next to the DSL router. If an IPTV operator is not flexible enough to allow customers to keep their TVs where they are without having to wire their house, the service will probably fail. The Powergrid DH-10PF Powerline Adapter allows operators to lower installation costs while offering consumers a hassle-free, non-intrusive and scalable solution. It is a win-win situation.”
A soon to be released version of the PowerGrid DH-10PF Ethernet Adapter will also enable one of the main requirements of IPTV operators: a TR-069-compliant powerline adapter. These devices will allow operators to remotely manage every node installed in the network, perform firmware upgrades and access logged data among many other features. “Our service provider customers want to manage every node in the home network without modifying the home gateway or broadband router in any way. Every change made to a gateway or router could delay a deployment by several months, especially if the equipment has to be re-certified.”, Harold Fitch stated.
About Comtrend Corporation With nearly five million products installed, Comtrend (www.comtrend.com) is established as one of the leading suppliers of DSL equipment in the world. Comtrend offers a broad array of leading edge, high-quality DSL products that embed ADSL, ADSL2+ and Bonded ADSL2+ technologies to support triple-play voice, video and data applications. These include IP-Video, VoIP, optional WiFi drops and industry standard QoS with VLAN traffic assignment, IGMP Snooping and IGMP Proxy. These in turn provide efficient traffic management and control in IP multicast applications. Comtrend is a global company with offices in Madrid, Spain, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, Irvine, California, Sao Paulo, Brazil, London, United Kingdom, Prague, Czech Republic and Taipei,Taiwan.
For further information, please contact: Frank Fang
Senior Manager for Outsourcing and Planning +886 22999 82 61 ext. 840
email: ffang@comtrend.com