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If last year's Supercomm showed the beginnings of telco video among large carriers, this year's trade show marks a maturation of the technology as vendors bring forward some knowledge and lessons learned from the initial big deployments of fiber-to-the-premises and fiber-to-the-node. It also helps that in the course of the past 12 months telco video has gone from a curiosity to a must-have for virtually every carrier. For vendors, the technology likewise has moved to the forefront, and for those not already in the game, there is a noticeable scramble.

Lesson No. 1 that will be on display at Supercomm 2005 is that the division between what is viewed as purely "video" technology and the gear that makes data go fast is quickly disappearing. That's largely due to the fact that it takes such a big data pipe to transmit video. The addition of video to a service provider's menu also puts tremendous pressure on bandwidth requirements further into the network, which can be used to offer higher-speed Internet access. Vendors at this year's show will play off that blurring of the lines. Case in point is Telco Systems, which will focus much of its Supercomm efforts around metro Ethernet access rings.

"The business case is primarily for data type applications at the edge, but all the carriers are looking at this and saying, 'How can I get video on this?'" said David Lee, vice president of marketing at Telco Systems.

At a higher level--a sort of Lesson No. 1A--carriers are being forced by competition to decide, earlier than anticipated, exactly what kind of video service they want to provide. There's no easing into the market, especially in the U.S., where carriers will be the second or third provider in every market.

What is virtually beyond question--and this is significant given past telco video efforts--is that carriers will be able to move forward with no video strategy whatsoever. In many cases, regardless of the details of that strategy, video must be view as part of an overall broadband package. According to recent research from Adventis, including video is one of the biggest drivers of broadband growth.

"Our evidence from all the research is that applications drive, for lack of a better term, pipe usage," said Ford Cavallari, senior vice president of Adventis' Broadband and Media Practice.

Among the most fundamental decisions that carriers must make, and one on which Supercomm vendors have varying degrees of opinions, is the level of video-on-demand they plan to offer. It's a given that telcos can't build a business plan around something that looks like traditional cable but is a few bucks less expensive. BT's decision to enter the video market with a VOD-only strategy is something that likely couldn't be mimicked by U.S. carriers but marks a maturation point for the overall market.

"[U.S. carriers] effectively have a new value proposition," said Jonathan Hurd, vice president of Adventis' Broadband and Media Practice. "The question is, can they differentiate themselves with enough of an on-demand offer to the point that they can be the first entrant in a new business model? If broadcast television was a Proctor & Gamble product, it would have been killed long ago because of the high rate of customer dissatisfaction."

Lesson No. 2 is that implementing video is more difficult than many may have thought. Perhaps most difficult is getting carriers to recognize that concepts like reliability take on a completely different meaning when video is involved. While five nines might be considered good enough for the voice service, customers have slowly been willing to accept less reliability for a cheaper price. The same doesn't work for video. As cable operators have upgraded plant and satellite has improved, customers increasingly are expecting high-quality video signals that don't fade out. Ever.

Spirent may be one of the lone vendors on the floor at Supercomm talking about the issue as it relates to video.

According to Andy Huckridge, product marketing manager for the company, a lot of vendors in the telco video world, in their rush to develop differentiated services, aren't paying enough attention to video quality testing.

"They're taking the stance of, 'When it left our building, it looked OK,'" he said.

The final lesson, and one on which virtually everyone agrees, is that telco video is still in the early stages of the product lifecycle, and current technology will continue to evolve.

Entrisphere, which has announced TDS and Grande Communications as customers over the last six months, embodies the new approach. Instead of simply rolling out another product and another triple-play demonstration, the company plans to play off of its experience by advocating that carriers push Internet Group Management Protocol capability further into the access network. Bringing IGMP--used to control channel changes in IP video networks, and typically a centralized function--deep into the network should be done as carriers make progress in video penetration rates.

"We think the further you push it out, the better," said Don McCullough, director of product marketing for Entrisphere. "Any time you have fewer customers watching the multicast than you have channels, it makes sense to push it out. For the benefit of savings and performance you push it down as far as possible."

E-mail me at vvittore@primediabusiness.com.