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For a show that has its roots firmly in the tip-and-ring era of providing plain old telephone service, Supercomm this year resembles something a lot closer to a traditional cable TV show.

While lacking the entertainment firepower of such B-list staples as the current World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the WWF) champion, access vendors on the floor at McCormick Place are showing plenty of demonstrations of how traditional telcos can tackle the entertainment market. Pushed by declining access line revenue and facing the threat of cable operators gaining significant market share of residential voice market, incumbent telcos almost all have come around to the idea that they must provide video as part of their bundle of services.

For vendors, the real breakthrough was at last year's Supercomm when SBC Chairman Ed Whitacre used his keynote address to announce that the company would be working with Microsoft TV to develop a video play. This year, many vendors are using that momentum to make video a focus of their booths.

“It really gets down to IPTV and video on demand for us,” said Walt Megura, vice president and general manager of Nortel's broadband division, which has a living room set up in its booth to demonstrate video applications with partners Minerva, Kasenna and Calix. “It's that content piece of what we started talking about last year with triple play.”

The theme is similar all over the floor. However, this year there's an increased sense of urgency and, to some extent, secrecy because of impending competition, Megura said.

“At the end of the day, there's a certain level of keeping the cards close to the chest,” he said. “Already the cable guys are rolling out voice and the telcos are going to become very defensive, because they're messing with the family jewels of core voice to some extent.”

Providing an effective counter-attack against cable is the theme in several booths. That same theme often was seen in small vendors booths throughout the past five years. The difference this year is that virtually every vendor with even the most remote connection to the access world will be focused on it. And, in fact, it's even drawing in non-traditional Supercomm exhibitors. Exhibit A is Microsoft, which is using the theme “Connect the Dots” in its booth this year.

“This is actually only the second year we've done Supercomm,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for Microsoft TV. “There's been a huge momentum that frankly started last year at Supercomm. That was the first real public showing of our IP TV platform in the States. Last year it was just about Microsoft TV. This year we have a bigger presence. We're bringing a story that is more about what Microsoft brings to all carriers. You're also seeing a pretty big presence in the Alcatel booth as well as some other partners.”

Indeed, unlike in years past when video was the domain of smaller specialty vendors such as NextLevel Communications and mPhase — and treated as almost a world unto itself — this year's video demonstrations are more likely to include a cornucopia of technologies. At the same time, video is now being wrapped up as just another element in the triple (or quadruple) play of services. Tellabs, which is making its first Supercomm appearance with the former AFC Communications as an integrated group, is stretching the triple play concept further by focusing less on the technology and more on the customer satisfaction elements.

“The overall theme is delivering the freedom echo boomers expect,” said Steve McCarthy, AFC's executive vice president of global customer sales and services. “The idea behind this is they're a very demanding bunch and if you can satisfy their needs and appetites, you can satisfy others. What we intend to do at the show is stretch everyone's imagination on the art of possibility. We're going to show virtually every application that our equipment is capable of.”

Likewise, Lucent Technologies is playing off the convergence theme this week, making its first large-scale appearance since announcing that it would combine its wireless and wireline divisions. Like most vendors, the company is giving a series of demonstrations that attempt to show its flexibility by not limiting itself to the customary fixed-line technologies. The onus is coming straight from customers' mouths, said Rob Piconi, vice president and general manager of the Broadband Solutions Group within the Multimedia Networks Group for Lucent.

“I'm talking to customers about wireline access solutions, and a lot of the times they're asking about whether we can integrate WiMAX capabilities in our DSLAMs,” he said. “That's a great example of why convergence isn't about what Lucent says, but about giving customers a lot of flexibility. In terms of video, this is where our customers have to go. If you look at just data and voice, it's not sufficient to grow ARPU. And when you go to video it has a lot of implications.”

Among the more important implications is the need for significantly more bandwidth, not only in the last 1000 feet to the home, but all the way up into the core network — while also maintaining reliability across all services. Telco Systems' demonstration is meant to show that with a significant upgrade that is being unveiled this week for its T5 compact switch. The new software essentially upgrades the T5 into a full carrier grade product with full NEBS compliance. In fact, the vendor is so confident in the upgrade that it's running live video in its booth this week.

“The booth is a living Ethernet ring,” said David Lee, vice president of marketing for Telco Systems. “It's a typical fiber-to-the-home demonstration but we're feeding little vignettes on the side.”

Such demonstrations are plentiful across the exhibit hall. Attendees, however, will notice that not only does the technology differ slightly from vendor to vendor, but this week also marks the first time that many have started to look beyond the boundaries of traditional video services. While most vendor executives eagerly say that carriers must offer up more than cable and satellite operators to succeed in the video market, most are struggling to figure out the specifics of that extra piece. For some booth denizens at Supercomm this week, it begins with high-definition TV.

“It's all around HDTV, and the sea change is starting to happen now,” said Tellabs' McCarthy. “There's a lot of pressure that exists in the marketplace to move to digital and HDTV.”

Vendors anticipate playing off that desire with gear that allows carriers to offer 30 Mb/s and beyond. Amedia, which initially came to market with fiber to the premises solution, is launching a new VDSL line card to go with its aggregation switch. The company believes that the emergence of video is causing significant shifts in the way carriers deploy access equipment.

“What we're seeing is a gradual fading away of ADSL because of video,” said Gary Feldman, vice president of marketing for Amedia. “We see embedded carriers who want certain neighborhoods to remain copper until competition drives them otherwise. We're trying to make it as graceful as possible to reuse copper.”

The objective is to give carriers enough bandwidth that they can handle multiple HD streams as well as open up non-traditional content.

“I refer to it as the Googleization of TV,” Feldman said. “Unless they put in an infrastructure to accommodate the large formats of HD sets, it's not going to be good enough. We think you're going to need to get up to 100 Mb/s and it's driven almost exclusively by the video requirements.”

Not everyone is subscribing to the more-bandwidth-is-better perspective. To some, the solution for telco video differentiation lies in pushing out Ethernet as the base technology. ADVA Optical, for instance, is pushing the technology because of both cost factors and the flexibility it allows in residential services.

“Ethernet is a nice protocol from a carriers' perspective, because it lets them put in one technology and they can sell all these service over that,” said Per Hanson, director of business development for ADVA. “IP video is going to be the big driver, but in a sense even broadband data is having an effect. So much of what you get today over the Internet is moving pictures.”

Still others are using this week to push subtle architectural changes in the access networks. Entrisphere is launching a new service card in its BLM 1500 FTTP platform that supports Internet Group Management Protocol, which is used for channel changing in telco video networks. The idea is to support multicasting in boxes that sit as close to the customer as possible.

“What we've done is actually pushed the traditional idea of IGMP one more step and put it on the service card, which serves a few dozen customers,” said Don McCullough, director of product marketing for Entrisphere. “Number one is that you aren't taking up revenue generating slots. Just as important if you put the multicast on the card itself, [and there's a problem] you're able to limit the damage to the few dozen customers on the card.”

At the same time, as more telcos grab video market share, pushing IGMP close to the customer it increases stability.

“Nobody likes taking a show and having it cold sometimes and hot other times,” McCullough said. “If you have IGMP serving a stable number of customers, the stability of the channel change is going to be more stable.”

Regardless of the technology on display this week and the economic imperative on telco, some vendors recognize that it may take many years for most consumers to see the end results.

“What almost always happens is people that are deep in technology see trends and think it's going to catch on quickly,” Hanson said. “Typically you see a fair amount of legacy services and technology hanging around for a long time.”