TV has evolved in the past few years from analog to digital technology, offering more channels, video on demand and much more. Three years ago, IPTV 1.0 over ADSL was introduced.

Now the industry is ready for the great leap to next-generation IPTV, with high-definition quality, mobility, interactivity, personalized services and a much better user experience. With IPTV, the user can become both a consumer and a producer of broadcast content.

This "networked TV" concept means a radical change to how TV content is distributed.

Peter Linder, director of Broadband Network Strategy at Ericsson, says this change calls for much more powerful broadband networks, using a standardized architecture and open interfaces. Ericsson is one of the founders of the newly formed Open IPTV Forum, an initiative that aims to unify the industry and which has been welcomed by several key players.

"This is the only way the networks can support easy access for content and service providers, and guarantee seamless access to all kinds of devices and screens," Linder says. "The end users are the drivers of the evolution of TV, and since we don't know the future, the architecture has to be very flexible."

The broadband TV of tomorrow will require a thousand times today's capacity. To be able to provide this powerful transmission capacity end to end, Ericsson has recently acquired cutting-edge companies Marconi, Redback, and Entrisphere, and has an outstanding offer for Tandberg.

Michael Martinsson, driver of Ericsson's Full Service Broadband project, explains how these acquisitions fit into the total Full Service Broadband network:

"The powerful optical network technology from Marconi strengthens the IP-based transport network on all levels, while Redback's routers fill the gap in the fast-growing multi-access edge segment, located between the access and core networks."

The latter refers to the fact that broadband is growing rapidly, and with the changes in future networks towards more capacity and converging mobile and fixed access, the importance of the multi-access edge is set to increase further. This node will deal with all common features for the access networks, such as services, charging, control and mobility. Redback has a strong portfolio of products in this domain.

"Entrisphere provides fixed networks with GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network), a very powerful fiber access technology, closer to the home," Martinsson says. "We need this capacity to be able to handle all the new IPTV channels and to give each user high capacities for both the downlink and the uplink, which is required for high definition, interactive and personalized TV services. In this area, GPON is complementing the new VDSL2 high-speed copper access technology with similar performance."