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UK needs more fibre for Broadband TV, not wireless

A new report from a 6 month study into the role of wireless broadband has highlighted the importance of FTTH (Fibre To The Home) for next gen services such as IPTV.

A report carried out by Electronics company Plextek for Ofcom was a six-month study into the role of wireless broadband.   The report states that upcoming wireless standards show a bias towards small screen mobile content delivery and are not attempting to address the challenge of “Broadband 2.0” requirements such as HDTV.

Steve Methley, senior consultant at Plextek, said in the report “Future high definition (HD) TV services are likely to demand undiluted access to streaming content at 10-15Mb/s per channel, which is massively in excess of what today’s ADSL systems can support.  Not enough people understand that today’s ADSL is a contended service – delivered rates may fall to only hundreds of kb/s.”

The ADSL broadband contention refers to the number of broadband users sharing a connection to an exchange at once.  As most users are on a broadband service with a 50:1 contention ratio, each pipe can potentially have up to 50 users on it.

Plextek says the UK needs more fibre in order to adopt applications such as IPTV as DSL broadband cannot provide the bandwidth required due to its technical limitations.  A combination of fibre connectivity backbone networks with fixed and wireless gigabit connections in the last mile is put forward as a potential solution.  Fibre can solve the contention issues by increasing back haul capacity and can solve the last mile issue by acting as a point to point solution alone.