Home Area Networks and IPTV

Chapter 2

Receiving Television via Internet: IPTV

2.1. Introduction

In France, Internet service providers (ISPs) mainly use copper telephone lines equipped with ADSL modems for their connections. The commercial offer can be a bundle (e.g. TV and Internet, Internet and phone, or TV, Internet and phone), or services can be unbundled and sold separately. The structure of the network of automatic telephone exchanges used in France since 1974 includes decentralized units called URAs (Uniform Resource Agents – units for the connection of subscribers) linked to the core of the switch by standard PCM (pulse code modulation) E1 or E2 links. These URA connect from 512 to 4,096 subscribers. For ADSL, a decentralized server called a DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer) is connected to the main distribution frame, to which the subscribers’ copper pair lines are wrapped. This architecture very often allows the distance from the DSLAM to the households to be relatively short. As a result, the percentage of households which have access to a line speed equal to or higher than 10 Mbps is relatively significant, around 40%, whilst the percentage of those unable to access a line speed higher than 125 kbps is lower than 10%. ADSL can transmit television as long as the line speed is at least 4 Mbps. In the near future, the Internet will be brought even closer, using a secondary distribution frame.

In order to differentiate themselves from one another, operators propose packages with added ...