Falcon Joins Growing Rural IPTV Race

Joining the race to provide the nation’s rural and lower-tier telcos a quick and easy entry to IPTV without buying and building the ecosystem themselves, Falcon Communications Inc. has announced IP/Complete.

Calling it a “bird-to-box” package, Falcon will compete with SES Americom’s much-discussed IP-PRIME managed turnkey offering, which has already been promoted heavily to members of two key trade groups: the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA) and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) for the past year.

IP-PRIME, which was due out last summer, will now be commercially available early next year. An SES executive told xchange at last week’s TelcoTV conference that the package will launch with roughly 400 channels and high-definition programming.

Falcon said its offering will have HD at some point next year and only has 145 channels.

The IP/Complete system, Falcon said, begins with a custom design and flat (but unspecified) subscriber-based pricing. Component-wise, it includes video from the satellite, router, DSLAM on past the middleware.

The Falcon system also includes installation, signal management, and testing, with final delivery to the set-top box. The vendor said the signal is fully secure and encrypted throughout the delivery system.

The IPTV package is two years in the making, Falcon said, with work culminating with final beta site testing and turn on this month at BPS Telephone in Bernie, Mo. By comparison, SES’s IP-PRIME has been in beta with four rurals for months.

The Falcon package uses a video signal from an Intelsat satellite, middleware from Minerva Networks Inc., encryption from Latens, broadband access gear from Occam Networks and a headend from NetProcessor.

Programming for SES’s IP-PRIME is delivered by a satellite fleet owned by its parent company.

Falcon Communications Inc. www.falconcommunications.com

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