ITV

Tag: MTNL

  • Murdoch dips into fibre-optic network: Alliances on the card

    Murdoch dips into fibre-optic network: Alliances on the card

    Murdoch mania still is hot in town as speculation about what he really intends to do in the Indian market rising to a fever pitch. He had a rash of meetings on 14 March with top brass industrialists and other prominent political personalities.

    Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and he discussed the possibilities of investment in the Infotech and telecom area. Ministerial sources disclosed his intentions to set up a state-of-the-art fibre optic telecom carrier network in Mumbai. A possible partner for this project is InCable which has been laying a fibre optic network in the city. Star TV does not have any investments in cable TV distribution, having sold out its holdings in Siticable to Zee TV. The fibre optic project will l cater to Murdoch’s Infotech dreams in India and facilitate e-commerce and e-education and create tremendous job opportunities, ministerial sources said.

    Murdoch also met up with MTNL and VSNL executives at the Ministerial meeting. MTNL, the state telecom provider MTNL which has a strong optic-fibre backbone and Hughes Ispat which also is rolling out its network over the city.

    The Chief Minister, wanting investments in the state, also assured Murdoch that News Corp’s proposal to set up an entertainment programming studio will be cleared within a month’s time. News Corp plans to invest around $100 million in this area alone. The commercial capital of India seems to have impressed Murdoch as he identified the tremendous potential in this city.

    It is now the time of Delhi for big announcements where Murdoch will hold high-profile meetings.

  • MTNL selects Time Broadband for IPTV

    MTNL selects Time Broadband for IPTV

    MUMBAI: State-owned telecom major MTNL has selected Time Broadband Services Pvt Ltd, India (TBSPL) to develop and handle the content delivery network for its IPTV services.

    TBSPL has signed a seven-year deal which will have IT major HP as its systems integrator. The company will design and deploy the content delivery network, aggregate and repurpose content, and market and promote the services

    “We have signed with Time Broadband as our franchisee for setting up the content delivery network. The first launch of IPTV will be in Delhi and Mumbai will follow. We expect to launch the service commercially by June,” says MTNL executive director, Mumbai, MS Rana.

    Time Broadband will have Israel-based Infogate Online as its middleware vendor while Verimatrix Inc. will provide content protection solutions. The digital headend will be from Optibase. Amino and Softier Inc. set-top boxes are being tested.

    “We are extremely glad to participate with a telecom giant for the IPTV project. While MTNL is investing on the networking technology, we are pumping in money for the content delivery network. HP is our systems integrator and will also be responsible for risk mitigation of the technology. The scalability test is being done in their laboratory at Grenoble in the US,” says Time Broadband managing director Sujata Dev.

    MTNL has invested in deploying a networking platform developed by Ericsson. On this network, MTNL can run its triple play services – voice, data and video.

    The telecom company is employing ADSL 2+ technology that can safely take up to 24 mbps at the origination point, says MTNL general manager broadband Peeyush Agrawal. “For the video part, we are using MPEG-4 compression technology,” he adds.