Triple Play - “Who’s On First, Second, Third, & Beyond?”

The animated TECHTip tutorial available here.

Triple play generally refers to multi-channel television (video), telephony (voice), and Internet (data) on existing twisted-pair wire, coaxial cable, satellite, BPL [Broadband over Power Lines] or other means including a mix of any of wireline and wireless services. The telephone company’s challenge is to provide existing Class 5 POTS [Plain Old Telephone Service] voice telephony and DSL data router IP network access with video services over the same twisted-pair or flat copper wire. Typical residential twisted pair copper wire can often not even support digital data much less 100 MBPS and higher speeds needed for video. Some emerging systems use low cost ethernet (10 MBPS to 10 GBPS) for voice, data, and video services. Since ethernet is an industry standard, new and future service offerings can be added with a finger - not a forklift.

In order to provide video services over copper wiring, video is switched at the CO [Central Office] rather than at the STB [Set Top Box]. That is, only one video channel is sent over the copper wire pair at a time. To change a channel the user sends a signal to the CO and the video channel is changed. Remote television channel switching response time is as good as satellite channel changing. Multi-television set households will depend on how many copper pairs are available to the customer location. Among the many future challenges is integration of the wide variety of home devices from garage door openers, hot water heaters, appliances, and other known and unknown systems. Various types of STBs, RG [Residential Gateways], and other systems will emerge to provide customer services. The remainder of the tutorial covers topics related to RGs. Traditional telephone, CATV [Community Antenna TeleVision], electrical, gas, water, waste water, and other utilities involve a number of different interfaces and dysfunctional systems which have different protocols and a vast array of OSS [Operational Support Systems] for billing, management, and support.

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