Beyond the Triple Play
When Bell Aliant needed a differentiator to compete with cable, it decided to provide home networking – a rarity back in 2005 in the cable space. But while the telephone service provider was comfortable delivering signals to the side of the house, and even into the house, it was clueless about routing signals inside the residence.
Then BA’s parent company, Bell Canada, started playing around with HomePNA (HPNA) – the home networking technology that runs IP packets over existing residential coax. Viola – now instead of fighting cable, BA was using installed coax (put there by the cable operator) to make money. The company estimates that between 90 and 95 percent of “new” Bell Aliant installs are in homes that already have coax running throughout the house.
In his CED Magazine article, telecom writer Jim Barthold discusses HomePNA impact on Bell Atlantic’s business, and talks with Michael Weissman of CopperGate – the leading provider of HomePNA technology.
Bell Aliant has now launched IPTV in three of its six provinces using a combination of Corinex Ethernet networking gear and Motorola set-top boxes equipped with CopperGate HPNA chips to deliver IPTV and later IP video to multiple TVs within a residence.
