Comtrend Corporation is rolling out its newest BeamLink Wireless Video Adapter, designed to distribute multiple high-definition IP video streams (HD-IPTV) reliably within the home. The BeamLink WAP-5834 utilizes a new Celeno chipset and is a carrier-grade WiFi-based HD access point (AP) and client.

Now available to service providers in North America, the device is powered by the new Celeno CL1820 802.11n high performance chipset which can provide up to 120Mbps video throughput with zero packet error rate. BeamLink supports up to four different concurrent HD streams and includes a robust carrier-grade feature set.

BeamLink provides cost-effective multi-client scalability for service providers while eliminating the cost and hassle of installing new cabling throughout the home. The ease of self-installation does away with expensive truck rolls; it connects to a gateway and up to four IP set top boxes.

Comtrend designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of networking equipment consisting of ADSL2+, Bonded DSL, VDSL2, GPON, STBs, VOIP and other networking technologies. The company has its North American headquarters in Irvine, California, and offices in Spain, Brazil, the UK, France, the Czech Republic, China and Taiwan.

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AT&T continued to ride the back of its wireline data service and U-verse television product in the second quarter, adding more than 209,000 subscribers to take it over 2.5 million overall, and saying its AT&T U-verse services topped $1 billion for the quarter for the first time ever.

The telco reported said it turned a $4.02 billion profit for the quarter, or 68 cents per share, up from $3.2 billion, or 54 cents a share in the like quarter last year. Second-quarter consolidated earnings were $30.8 billion, up a modest $194 million, or 0.6 percent, from a year ago.

"We delivered another strong quarter, with improved revenue trends, double-digit earnings growth and solid cash flow. These results add to our confidence going into the second half of the year," said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and chief executive officer. "We continue to see positive signs of growth in almost every customer segment of our business, especially wireless, which speaks to the quality of our execution and our leadership in the industry's most powerful growth driver - mobile broadband. I am excited by the opportunities ahead."

On the wireline side, AT&T said it saw IP date revenues, driven by U-verse expansion, increase 32 percent, it was the second straight quarter of sequential growth in wireline consumer revenues. Total revenue from residential customers totaled $5.4 billion, flat compared to the second quarter of 2009. Versus the first quarter of 2010, consumer wireline revenues increased 1.1 percent.

AT&T added 209,000 U-verse TV subscribers, an increase of almost 60 percent over the past year. In the second quarter, the AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet attach rate continued to run above 90 percent.

More than three-fourths of AT&T U-verse TV subscribers have a triple- or quad-play option from AT&T. ARPU for U-verse triple play customers continued to rise, up nearly $160, or 13.8 percent year over year and 6.8 percent from the first quarter of 2010.

AT&T's U-verse deployment now reaches 25 million living units. Companywide penetration of eligible living units is more than 13 percent, and across areas marketed to for 30 months or more, overall penetration is more than 22 percent. AT&T's total video subscribers, which combine the company's U-verse and bundled satellite customers, reached 4.6 million at the end of the quarter, representing 17.9 percent of households served.

U-verse continues to drive a transformation in AT&T's consumer business, reflected by the fact that consumer IP revenues now represent 40.4 percent of AT&T's consumer wireline revenues, up from 30.6 percent in the year-earlier quarter. In the second quarter, AT&T U-verse revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time, more than twice the U-verse revenues in the second quarter of 2009.

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Video delivery specialist Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT) says Maldives cable provider CableNET is deploying a range of Harmonic video and edge processing solutions to power the first high definition (HD) and near video-on-demand (nVOD) network in the Maldives.

Harmonic last year released DOCSIS Lite, which offers the cable TV industry a route to more advanced IPTV-like services by using IPTV-optimized edge QAM devices and CMTS software, said CableNET will be able to run simultaneous cable and MMDS services to the entire country with a single bandwidth-efficient MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) headend. CableNET will be the first operator in the Maldives to provide MPEG-4 SD and HD, nVOD and digital channel mosaic services.

The deal involves Harmonic's ProView 7000 and 2900 integrated receiver/decoders (IRDs) to receive the channel feeds from satellite; Ion AVC encoders and the ProStream 1000 stream processing platform to compress and multiplex the video signals for distribution; the ProStream 8000 digital mosaic solution to create multi-channel mosaics; and the NSG 9000 universal edgeQAM for the distribution of the programming over CableNET's cable and MMDS networks.

Harmonic's NMX Digital Service Manager controls the entire digital headend.

CableNET, established in 2001, is one of the fastest growing companies in the Maldives, and is now available to thousands of home in the capital island of Male and its nearby islands. In addition, CableNet has launched services in the Southern Atolls of Addu and FuahMullah, and is continually exploring other markets around the country. For more:
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Alcatel-Lucent is rolling out a compact-IPTV platform aimed at Tier 2 and Tier 3 telcos that's powered by Microsoft's Mediaroom, can scale from 1,000 to more than 100,000 set-top-boxes, reduces the numbers of servers needed to a single rack, uses HP Virtual Connect technology to reduce the complexity of the architecture and nearly eliminates cabling.

The turnkey, mini-IPTV product is designed to cost-effectively provide high-quality television programming, and also enables new consumer media services through the blending and personalization of web and broadcasting content. Alca-Lu says the platform is the only one that includes Microsoft Mediaroom that can support more than three times as many households using a single equipment rack.

"We were seeing a lot of opportunity in that market globally, given that the larger operators had taken a position on IPTV and the Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators were finding the business case challenging," said Alcatel-Lucent's VP for multimedia integration Geeta Chaudhary. "In North America, the broadband stimulus package has created a lot of opportunity with networks infrastructure being upgraded to be able to support video." The company sees a market, in the next two years, of up to 11 million subscribers in North America.

Alcatel-Lucent's Integrated Solution for Microsoft Mediaroom, actually is a substantially modified version of an existing platform the company has deployed in more than 25 large networks globally.

Earlier, said Chaudhary, the smallest deployment available was around 200,000-300,000 STBs with about 150-200 servers. The new offering, in the bottom line, means less racking, stacking and cabling, and a reduced deployment time.

"It's pre-integrated so the time to market is fast, less than 90 days, compared to a six- to nine-month timeframe in the past," Chaudhary said. "And it's green, there's significantly less power consumption."

Chaudhary said telcos looking for an offering to as few as 5,000 subscribers should find the new platform affordable.

The solution, said Yankee Group analysts Vince Vittore, fit the needs of smaller telcos to offer a product that can compete with cable and satellite at a reasonable price point.

Alca-Lu said Cinergy MetroNet is its first customer to roll out the new platform, with a July 26 launch date in six Indiana cities reaching about 50,000 potential households.

"We want to provide our customers superior service and access to such capabilities as WholeHome DVR, interactive applications and over-the-top content," said John Cinelli, CEO of Cinergy MetroNet. "Alcatel-Lucent's IPTV solution fits our business needs and gives us a powerful, flexible, and differentiating tool to deliver IPTV-based services to our customers."

Chaudhary said Alcatel-Lucent expects to see 20-30 deployment of the essentially vendor-agnostic play in the first year. "We're pretty bullish on this one," she said. "It's getting to a scale that can be managed by developers, the hospitaity industry, and most of the independent telcos. The broadband stimulus package is key to us for this solution, as companies look for operations to launch on top of this network to monetize it."

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