Desperately Seeking Standards

Various Industry Groups Work to Formulate IPTV Specs

Looking to break a major logjam in the standards creation process for IPTV, the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) will meet this week, its membership expected to complete a series of foundational specs designed to help carriers roll out the services.

The effort will culminate years of work undertaken to provide operators in North America with a sorely needed, end-to-end plan to speed deployment and simplify operation and management of IPTV services. It’s one of many efforts addressing video services.

"Our goal for this month is to push out all of the documents for linear TV and start the closure process," says Dan O’Callaghan, chair of the ATIS IIF Task Force and a principal member of the technical staff at Verizon Communications Inc. The rest of the year will be used to hammer out specs for TV services features such as video on demand and pay-per-view movies and events.

The ATIS IIF develops requirements, standards and specifications supporting the interoperability of an end-to-end deployment of IPTV services. The group is a leading source of IPTV-related technical contributions to standards bodies worldwide including the ITU-T.

ATIS claims more than 50 of its member companies actively are engaged in IPTV standardization efforts through the ATIS IIF. That includes Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T Inc., BT, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Motorola Inc., Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel Networks, Qwest Communications International Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Verizon, among others.

The good, and sometimes bad, news is that the ATIS group is not alone in its efforts.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the DSL Forum and the lesser-known Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), also are contributing to IPTV standards work. However, these groups recently have begun to work together.

"We all labor to ensure that efforts by the groups stay aligned, which can mean performing a gap analysis to avoid time-consuming overlap," explains Robin Mersh, COO of the DSL Forum. "All this work is done on an ongoing basis. A big reason for it beyond our own needs is not to create confusion among those outside the process. That’s the last thing we want to do."

What’s of far more concern than the number of standards-driving groups, however, is the dearth of specifications defining interoperability between the long chain of devices in the ecosystem required to deploy IP video services.

"Our second IPTV rollout, to include new encryption, middleware, VoD and set-top boxes, has proven to be a nightmare," says Shane Broyles, R&D coordinator and central office manager with Rural Telephone Co., in Lenora, Kan. "The sales people will say ‘Oh yes, we will and have interoperated with all the major players.’ But we have really struggled with interoperability with all the best-of-breed vendors we chose."

Broyles says there is certainly plenty of room for improvement and a need for different components of the IPTV ecosystem to work together. "I would caution anyone considering getting into the business to do their homework thoroughly."

The lack of complete standards in key areas often drives service providers to deploy services, or service features, based on a partially proprietary scheme, as was the case with Verizon.

The company’s whole-home DVR service, a differentiator in a fiercely competitive market, required home video devices to interconnect and work with a set-top box. It couldn’t wait for final DLNA standards and so was built using pieces of them along with what Verizon generically called a secret sauce.

"Stated simply, it was quicker to go beyond the domain of the DLNA’s front-running spec for multimedia home connectivity," admits Verizon’s O’Callaghan.

"With standards, there’s always a gap because they can’t keep up with every service everyone wants to offer," explains O’Callaghan. "You have to wing it or do something else."

This situation resulted in the creation of the ATIS group and its ambitious efforts.

Concurrently, the other aforementioned standards-driving groups were being formed or advancing with technology-specific efforts of high value to services providers. Soon O’Callaghan and others found themselves attending multiple groups’ meetings and helping synch up the efforts, sharing documents and knowledge. Case in point: The regional ATIS group will pass its documents up to the global ITU organization for inclusion in a set of international standards for IPTV deployments around the world. The ITU also will include critical specs from the DSL Forum, such as TR-69 for remote management and monitoring, in its efforts.

The fast-evolving DLNA also contributes its specs to others such as ATIS to speed the standard connection of a broad array of consumer electronics devices, well beyond TVs, to service providers’ home networking systems.

CEA's Virginia Williams

And while it’s not a standards-making group, the CEA, with more than 2,000 member companies, has been tracking and evaluating an array of standards-setting initiatives for more than four years now.

"We decided we needed to poke around then and look at new technologies before the cable companies and telcos got involved," recalls Virginia Williams, director of technology and standards for the CEA. "We don’t need to write standards from whole cloth as there are already many efforts under way within IP."

The CEA took the initiative early on to create the IPTV Oversight Coordination Committee and performed a gap analysis to identify areas that weren’t being addressed as well as to avoid duplication of efforts in other areas.

Beyond defining the minimum to be embedded into CE devices for connection to home networks, the CEA particularly is interested in digital rights management (DRM) issues that arise when content moves from a WAN to a home network, says Williams.

The CEA has identified DRM and diagnostics needs and is working independently with three different groups to advance the effort but doesn’t see a viable solution short of a gateway device in the home to handle core functions such as transcoding and translation, something operators wish to avoid, says the CEA executive.

"Frankly, it’s premature to have an end-to-end solution," Williams says. "Our industry evolved separately with cable companies, telcos and others going in different directions. Reconciling that is not a trivial task. We need to have a gateway device."

With the diversity of operators in mind, the CEA has created a service provider working group hoping to ensure its efforts are applicable across industries.

ATIS’ IIF has been working on DRM issues as well, but CEA’s Williams claims the group "is dominated by Verizon and telco suppliers. It’s in the best interest of our members to have a device that works across all groups. An end-to-end solution from ATIS may not match what happens across a cable structure. A universal device would also mean consumers would not have to buy a lot of stuff."

The ITU, which defines overarching global standards, drawing specifications from the ATIS IIF and the DSL Forum, among others, created an IPTV focus group in April of 2006.

The ITU plans by midyear to release documents covering requirements and architecture as a recommended standard as part of its IPTV Global Standards Initiative, according to Ghassem Koleyni, chairman of the ITU-T Focus Group on IPTV, and an executive at Nortel.

"What we’re producing is a set of global standards that’s a superset of documents from multiple focus groups, with the groups working together to expedite the documents," says Koleyni. "It’s a specification that people can implement."

The ITU has been working on all aspects of IPTV requirements, including home networking, security, meta data, middleware, control aspects and both unicast and multicast schemes. The group has taken work from the DSL Forum (QoS) and the Home Gateway Initiative (home networking), and documents from the ATIS IIF and incorporated it in its efforts, says Koleyni.

"We take a broad view of IPTV, aware that it’s more than just TV over IP," says Koleyni. "It can use the capabilities of next-generation networks and IMS to extend its functionality."

It’s known as the DSL Forum, but lately the organization’s technical reference-creating efforts have expanded well beyond DSL, with works-in-progress covering PON equipment, an array of devices inside the home, policy management and in-home storage systems.

"We’re becoming more and more access-agnostic," says Robin Mersh, COO of the DSL Forum. Its efforts have two main steps: creating a working text (WT), which is focused on until finished, at which point it becomes a technical reference (TR). "Once they become a TR, anyone can use them."

The forum produced a series of specifications last year, among them TR 135 and 140, which specify data models for monitoring set-top boxes and storage devices respectively. TR 126 covers quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements.

Currently, the DSL Forum is hard at work evolving a number of WTs that Mersh believes will achieve TR status by yearend 2008. Among them is WT 142, which defines a framework for TR 69-enabled PON devices, which is important as "the industry is using more and more hybrid approaches," according to Mersh. On the network architecture front, WT 101 defines a carrier migration plan away from an ATM backbone network, while WT 156 defines a GPON destination for the migration. On the testing front, WT 114 and 115 specify test plans for VDSL2 connections.

For more on the DLNA, read “Home Networking Is Left to Its Own Devices” from the January 2008 issue of xchange.

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