How to Prepare Your Network for IPTV

An IPTV deployment without thorough front-end planning and foresight can be extremely destructive to all existing services. The extreme amount of bandwidth IPTV requires your network to handle is the main culprit of these potential problems.

When looking to deploy IPTV on your network here are the 4 main areas of your network that need to be dissected to determine their capability and make sure they don't cause service meltdown.

1.) General Network Architecture: A poorly constructed network will make IPTV impossible. The network needs to be examined from a physical and logical point of view. Sometimes a major overhaul of the network needs to occur even before an IPTV project can begin simply because the network architecture won't support the demands.

2.) IP Routing and Switching Architecture: The IP Network’s overall architecture must be able to fit in to a proper multicast design, the underlying transport mechanism of IPTV.

3.) Access Network: While fiber to the home (FttH) will generally provide enough bandwidth to the home, operators running DSL may have a much harder time. DSL is fine for providing small amounts of data currently being offered, but a move to IPTV requires that large amounts of time-sensitive video traffic be transported across the network.

4.) Optical Network: Since IPTV requires a lot of bandwidth, it can put a large constraint on an overall fiber transport network. While SONET has been an effective transport medium to move traditional data and voice services for years, often times it is not scalable enough of a platform to move the mass amounts of IPTV content throughout the entire plant in an efficient manner. 

DWDM is a great way to leverage existing fiber without new construction. It also allows protocols such as Ethernet to be transported natively across the network without intruding on the existing services running on SONET.  However, should DWDM not be an option, SONET, when properly engineered, can still provide some effective solutions.

In upcoming blogs, we will dive into each area of the network and give you the best advice ensuring your IPTV deployment is planned and executed in a way that saves you time and money.  To make sure you don’t miss out, subscribe to this blog. CCI is also on Twitter.