The telecom market is nowadays very competitive thus value-added services play a decisive role. Customer loyalty and increased ARPU must be achieved with attractive, competitively priced service bundles including voice, video and data, leveraged, for the moment, from the existing infrastructure. With available IPTV solutions, it is possible already now to deliver more than standard triple play, for instance SMS/MMS and email, Internet music, interactive games, Video broadbast, VoD, AoD, PVR, video telephony, Internet on TV, a walled „garden“ package. Interactive applications can be delivered through a set-top box connected to the user’s DSL line and, in addition, the user’s PC, TV set and telephone can be all connected to the TV set-top box. But to let users to get this content, carriers will have to overhaul their network architecture to enable much greater amount of bandwidth, flexibility and service quality. Moreover, many believe that a bandwidth of 50 Mbit/s downstream is needed, if not 100 Mbit/s, to achieve the service quality necessary to deliver a "TV-like" experience.

The question is, thus, whether a long-term copper solution exist or instead, carriers need to deploy networks based on FTTH. This report provides an overview of the present IPTV projects available and the new business models related to them.

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