At IIR IPTV Forum 2006 in Lisbon, Portugal, Siemens Networking GmbH & Co will lead the Pre-Conference workshop focused on the next IPTV wave.

This briefing will help understand IPTV trends, lessons learned from customer roll-outs -both from network and application perspectives, and solutions that will enable mass scale IPTV deployments.

IPTV has been hyped during the last years as the "ARPU saver" for incumbent service providers. Yet, current deployments are only nascent, with major service providers such as Telefonica or France Telecom officially having less than 300,000 IPTV subscribers at the moment. The new frontier is about mass scale IPTV: is the infrastructure ready to support millions of IPTV subscribers looking each for specific services like Video-on-demand or peer-to-peer messaging?

Siemens experts will share their experience both from network and application perspectives, and suggest paths to successfully launch mass scale IPTV.

They will elaborate on when service provider should deploy DSLAMs or PON in the access networks, or how Siemens Advanced Ethernet Package (AEP) solves scalability issues in metropolitan networks with VLAN Cross-Connect.

Siemens specialists will also elaborate on how IPTV applications will look like in the next years, and why open architecture is key for successful middle ware implementation. A specific session will also be dedicated on the challenges posed by the conjunction of IMS and IPTV services, and its impact on the network for service providers.

The presentations will be held on 27th November.