At the TelcoTV conference today in San Diego, Nortel has launched an end-to-end IPTV solution designed to help speed the deployment of new IPTV services and enable additional revenue generating opportunities. These services provide competitive differentiation over existing television offerings and have the potential to dramatically change the way people use their TVs for both entertainment and communications.

Nortel's IPTV solution uses a service provider's broadband network to deliver television, video, and other advanced services to subscribers. By integrating Nortel's industry-leading SIP-based multimedia communication technology into the television experience, IPTV subscribers can use their TVs to communicate and interact with their friends and family through a variety of media, such as voice, instant messaging, video, and picture sharing. In addition, Nortel's solution works with wireless devices such as PDAs and cell phones.

"Nortel strives to provide more than a superior IPTV network for our customers. Our goal is to enable new and exciting IPTV applications that give our customers a competitive advantage to win and retain IPTV subscribers," said Walt Megura, general manager, Broadband Networks, Nortel. "By using a Nortel solution with our ecosystem partners, service providers can benefit from a complete solution that has been extensively tested to help ensure high levels of end-to-end reliability, security, and cross-solution management."

Nortel has established a strategic ecosystem of IPTV providers and products to form a complete end-to-end solution. Extensive testing in Nortel's IPTV lab in Ottawa helps ensure that the solution will meet the demanding functionality, reliability and security requirements of service providers. The end-to-end solution, including the underlying high-performance Ultra Broadband access network, will be sold and supported by Nortel, which has proven experience and the extensive professional services required to support the deployment of large service provider networks.

Security and reliability are two items critical to IPTV's success in the carrier environment. As such, Nortel is committed to identifying and addressing security issues, as well as providing superior reliability in its IPTV network designs. Another challenge that IPTV introduces for telco service providers is the complexity of integrating the many new components that are required to acquire, process, and deliver high-quality video services. Nortel is helping customers eliminate this added complexity by providing a single point of contact to manage the entire network build-out, as well as a broad range of professional services geared to removing the risks associated with planning, operating, and managing an IPTV network.

"As telcos move to deploy IPTV services to compete with cable triple-play offerings, network complexity and time-to-market delays are a real obstacle to success," said Matt Davis, director, Broadband Access Technologies, Yankee Group. "Service providers are looking at a variety of integration options, and companies like Nortel can support and speed up the rollout of next generation services by helping them fuse together voice, data and IPTV."

Nortel offers end-to-end IPTV solutions for both the North American (ANSI) and European (ETSI) markets from a variety of best-in-class vendors, and will continue to augment its IPTV portfolio with products designed to provide customers with the best possible solutions.

Nortel's current end-to-end IPTV solution ecosystem includes: IPTV middleware from Minerva Networks and Orca Interactive; video-on-demand (VoD) from Kasenna and BitBand; content security solutions from Irdeto; encoders from Harmonic and Optibase; a Web browser interface from Espial; digital program insertion (DPI) from Terayon; an emergency alert system (EAS) from Trilithic; xDSL modems from Westell; and set-top boxes from Amino.