Imagine getting access to all global TV channels, choosing content on demand – customized to your profile – whenever it suits you, with the same user-interface on your mobile, cable High Definition TV and broadband screen. You might have a hobby, such as skiing, and want to create a new channel about that. Or you might want to send a sporting event from TV to a friend's mobile phone.

That is what IP-TV is about. It still has a modest number of subscribers – about 5 million – but it is growing rapidly. Telefónica in Spain, offering video calls from the TV, IP-TV and video on demand  has 200,000 users, and in Hong Kong there are more than half a million.

The potential for new services is the reason why Ericsson talks about interactive multimedia services and not internet TV. One-way broadcast TV is just a small part of what IP-TV will be.

Today, many cable TV companies offer triple services: TV, internet and voice. Now, it is the telecom operator's turn. Coming from the voice area, they accessed the internet by introducing ADSL solutions, which now have top speeds of 20Mbps per second. That is good enough, but the main task is to use the existing bandwidth, whether it is 2, 8 or 20Mbps, in an optimal way. However, in the future, for large numbers of people using high-quality IP-TV simultaneously; it might need up to 100Mbps – which is what the coming VDSL2 offers.

Fixed network operators face a challenge to be able to guarantee good service quality. IP-TV is a demanding service for the network – the packet loss has to be minimized and the bandwidth maximized. The operators have to understand the challenges in developing their network to cater for this.

High Speed requires using very high frequencies on the copper line, which creates new problems of cross-talk and sensitivity to impulse noise, etc. No copper line is equal to another and all operators have the same struggle of optimizing the capacity for a given line and service type. The better the line is configured, the more stability and less information loss.

Much of what the Ericsson R&D team does at the lab is to inform operators about how to configure complex line parameters for the central office transceivers. For the last mile access Ericsson is working with a unique solution called Copper Plant Manager (CPM) for optimizing the resources in the copper network. The tool will handle abstraction of line properties and analysis from single line to a complete copper plant. CPM will give automated support in optimizing the transceiver performance for specific lines and service levels and also be able to state achievable network capacity, identify noise sources, store history and discover degradation of a network.

In the future, converged telecom quality IP core networks will support both mobile and fixed IP-TV. And IMS, IP Multimedia System, will be the common control of all networks. An internal study shows that Ericsson will be able to offer a good IMS-controlled IP-TV solution.

IP-TV will with that be the next IMS service, complementing weShare, Push-To-Talk and EMM multimedia.