Independent telco Livingston Telephone is now delivering video over DSL services in rural Texas.
The carrier already sells voice, private line, Internet, and some cellular services. Now Livingston is adding video on demand and interactive digital TV service over DSL at an incremental cost, with a return on investment within nine to 18 months, says Steve Garrison, director of corporate marketing at Riverstone Networks, which is providing routers to handle the multicast routing functionality for the deployment. Garrison would not disclose the value of the contract.
Other vendors for Livingston’s VoDSL include Myrio, Minerva and AFC. Using the Internet Group Multicast Protocol, Riverstone's RS metro routers forward channels from Minerva's video servers to AFC's DMAX 1120 DSL Multiservice Access Platform and perform the group management or channel change functions in the solution. Myrio provides the middleware. To ease traffic on Livingston's network and increase capacity nearly tenfold with existing fiber, Riverstone's metro routers were also deployed to create a new gigabit Ethernet backbone to handle the bandwidth-intensive Internet and video broadcast traffic.
Riverstone’s Garrison says independent telcos as a group are investing in new technologies today and are thus a key focus for Riverstone. “We’ve made considerable effort to jump into the IOC market” he says.
“The IOCs seem to be leading in the next gen services market this year because they’re incumbent and because they have a good understanding of what the community wants,” he adds.
Riverstone, he says, is in trials for this solution with three or four other independent operators. “There are some other clever things they are looking at,” he adds. “Metro Ethernet is another [thing indies are looking at].” Riverstone expects to have news on this front in a month or two, he says.
