If you live in a large city, you most probably have a computer plugged to the Internet, cable television and a remnant of the past, the telephone.
In the past couple of years, however, more and more phone companies have been trying to bundle these three services into one – the so-called triple play. Its main advantages are the lower costs (compared to paying separately for the three) and the single bill for the three services. Technologically speaking, the three can be bundled, if the operator has broadband access to the Internet at 100 Mb/s in its network. That speed and the services it can deliver to the end user are almost only possible with terrestrial fibre-optic access to the home of the subscriber, techies say. Only then can you get home security systems and video/tv-on-demand.
“Now many operators are upgrading their cable networks to offer the Internet and voice but at the expense of quality,” according to Bozhidar Ignatov, manager of Net Is Sat, which supplies access to the Internet and voice. “ Net Is Sat is developing infrastructure at the moment which will allow us to launch other services in the future. Not just triple play, but also video monitoring, antispam, etc. In the past year we have laid over 200 kilometres of fibre-optic cables in Sofia alone,” Ignatov added. “Triple play cannot be a basis to start a company. First comes the company, and not the service,” said Georgios Roussos, executive director of Intracom Bulgaria, a company which offers end solutions to telecom providers. Vestitel, a subsidiary of gas retailer Overgas, is also hectically laying down cables. Its triple play is available to customers in Sofia, Varna, Bourgas, Rousse and Veliko Tarnovo. But it lays cables alongside gas pipelines so if there is no gas pipeline near your home, there is no point looking for triple play.
Two experienced cable TV and Internet providers, Eurocom Cable MB and Cabletel, have also added voice to their bundles. Petyo Staykov, executive director of Eurocom Cable MB, told Capital weekly that the company launched the service some two months ago after trialling it for months to make sure it was quality enough. He said subscribers in Sofia and Plovdiv would save 30 pct-40 pct of the costs, should they switch to triple play. Eurocom offers triple play via fibre-optics and coaxial cable, which is the best option for the Bulgarian market, according to Staykov – laying fibre-optic cables to all homes would be rather cost-consuming at the moment. WiMax- and UMTS-based wireless alternatives to triple play are hardly possible now as they offer lower speeds and mobile television is rather an illusion. Moreover, they may offer poorer quality for higher prices.
One of the purely market hurdles for triple play may turn out to be the fact that the bulk of the home users, that are the service’s main target, have a BTC telephone they will have to cut off or pay. Many of them are unwilling to give up their telephone numbers, which raises the issue of number portability. Yet others may well do it as they only use the telephones once in a blue moon anyway.
May be others share Ignatov’s opinion that triple play is nothing more than a marketing bundling of three services – voice, data and video. These services cannot yet offer anything revolutionary new but for the lower costs.
All market players refuse to quote numbers of triple play customers with the motive that the market is still young and it is too early to make such calculations. In other words, the service has too few users to consider them a critical mass. Yet all operators report considerable growth in demand, especially in new buildings and neighbourhoods where cables are laid from scratch. “The fibre-to-the-home technology is the best for triple play. We will build broadband fibre-optic grids in any town we have the potential,” says Vestitel. The provider guarantees a connectivity of 100 Mb/s, the basis of the real data-voice-video-in-fibre-optic-cable service.
29/09-05/10/07, P85
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