(16 March 2006 9:00 pm)

MUMBAI: State-owned telecom major MTNL has selected Time Broadband Services Pvt Ltd, India (TBSPL) to develop and handle the content delivery network for its IPTV services.

TBSPL has signed a seven-year deal which will have IT major HP as its systems integrator. The company will design and deploy the content delivery network, aggregate and repurpose content, and market and promote the services.

"We have signed with Time Broadband as our franchisee for setting up the content delivery network. The first launch of IPTV will be in Delhi and Mumbai will follow. We expect to launch the service commercially by June," says MTNL executive director, Mumbai, MS Rana.

Time Broadband will have Israel-based Infogate Online as its middleware vendor while Verimatrix Inc. will provide content protection solutions. The digital headend will be from Optibase. Amino and Softier Inc. set-top boxes are being tested.

"We are extremely glad to participate with a telecom giant for the IPTV project. While MTNL is investing on the networking technology, we are pumping in money for the content delivery network. HP is our systems integrator and will also be responsible for risk mitigation of the technology. The scalability test is being done in their laboratory at Grenoble in the US," says Time Broadband managing director Sujata Dev.

MTNL has invested in deploying a networking platform developed by Ericsson. On this network, MTNL can run its triple play services - voice, data and video.

The telecom company is employing ADSL 2+ technology that can safely take up to 24 mbps at the origination point, says MTNL general manager broadband Peeyush Agrawal. "For the video part, we are using MPEG-4 compression technology," he adds.