UTStarcom, Inc. announced a three-year contract through its partnership with AKSH Optifibre Ltd. to deploy its RollingStream end-to-end IPTV solution with Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) in India. The contract represents the first commercial IPTV deployment in India and AKSH Optifibre Ltd. is the first company to launch IPTV in India. AKSH is the pioneer in optifibre fiber and cable technologies and their main product is a Fiber-to-the-Home solution.

"Consumers have come to expect sterling services that are both innovative and affordable from MTNL," said Shri RSP Sinha, chairman and managing director at MTNL. "We take the lead, yet again, in ushering in a true revolution in home entertainment with the country's first IPTV service. IPTV provides an interactive viewing experience and allows for multitude of exciting revenue generating applications to be deployed. Our existing presence in more than four million homes in New Delhi and Mumbai through our broadband service will give MTNL a tremendous headstart in changing the way people watch television."

The service, which will utilize MTNL's existing broadband network as the content delivery backbone, will consist of traditional broadcast television, video- and music-on-demand, videoconferencing capabilities and time-shifted TV, allowing users to access television content on any channel up to one week in the past. All MTNL broadband subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai are anticipated to have access to the service, which launched in December 2006.

"By pricing the basic level of service at 125 rupees, we hope to attract a large number of our broadband subscribers to our IPTV service and drive revenue growth through the additional value-added services, like time-shift capabilities and video-on-demand, enabled by UTStarcom's RollingStream," Sinha added.