According to a recent report by ABI Research, IPTV over wireless broadband is an attractive offering for consumers and carriers – but there are many challenges to overcome to ensure it can be delivered effectively.

Whilst IPTV can currently be delivered to homes over wired connections, its bandwidth hungry nature means carriers are constantly scrambling to upgrade infrastructure. Adding to this cost, they have to connect homes (generally via coax cable) to the main cable running down the street.

This is where wireless is clearly advantageous: It’s more cost effective in reaching more consumers and there are no cabling issues to speak of. However, according to the research paper, conventional wireless technology simply wouldn’t cut it when it comes to high quality streaming media.

Is Wireless the way to go?

It’s not all bad news though – With the development of “smart wifi”, which improves on conventional wireless through some fancy engineering of the signal transmission, there’s a real possibility that wireless IPTV could be delivered to consumers with the same reliability and quality of service as wired connections.

It seems though that consumers don’t care how IPTV is delivered to them – as long as its affordable, high quality and they can see value in it. So it’s up to the carriers to do the sums and decide which is the more viable medium going forward – wired or wireless?

At the speed technology changes, and with the popularity of internet video, I feel it won’t be long until we find out.

[ABI Research report]

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