There is always more than one way to solve a problem. This can be demonstrated in no better way than the logic that the Airties Wireless Networks management went through when they decided to boot strap a technology business in Turkey.
They could have raised money in the US, but they would need a lot of it, and then they would need to fight it out in a tough market against established names where all telcos had already made their vendor choices. Or they might go to Turkey, where each of them had been born, and start up in a market where technology businesses were alien, and no investment money was available. Both places, Istanbul and California, offered them a good labor market, sea and sunshine.
Naturally they chose the latter and now five years later have emerged as a front runner not only in advanced WiFi systems, but have now entered the IPTV set top market on the back of a deal with Turk Telecom ISP subsidiary TTNet announced this week.
The problem of how to raise the money was solved by bootstrapping the business themselves with cash earned from their silicon valley days, plus a little help from a few local angel investors.
With stints designing chips at National Semiconductor, Analog Devices and writing software at Cisco, the founders were both equipped with some cash, but also with some considerable technical expertise. This all happened back in in 2004, and at Faultline we came across the company a year later in 2005, and have always known that the company knew a thing or two about the WiFi business.
But one of the benefits for B’lent ‘elebi and co-founders , is that he has managed to turn back time in his now native Turkey and build a solid relationship with the local tier 1 incumbent which has 6 million DSL lines and which is talking aggressively about upgrading its IPTV capability, by installing ADSL2+ lines and putting DSLAMS at the curb. Already TTNet reckons it can take on DigitTurk and D-Smart, the two dominant DTH vendors, at the 3 million homes which can already get 10 Mbps or better DSL at 81 cities in Turkey.
For those who have never been to Istanbul, the largest City in Turkey, it sits astride the Bosphorus, a sea strait which links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, connected in turn by the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea, part of the Mediterranean. It is one of the busiest waterways you could wish to see, reminiscent of Hong Kong in terms of sea traffic, over which 2 million inhabitants a day cross to what is the ‘other side of town’ from the living side of the City to the working side. Interestingly this means a step from Asia to Europe, and there are even a couple of immensely impressive bridges that will let you drive the same journey.
Perhaps it is this East meets west mentality which helps Airties stay at the leading edge of technology, or perhaps it’s the seething 12.5 million city inhabitants (17 million in the wider metropolitan area), each with their business and personal broadband needs, which made Istanbul the right place to start the business. To visit it feels like a 1970s version of Paris, but moved to a hotter climate and with more people and more traffic.
But it has a classical Eastern European business shape. The government owned incumbents like TTNet still have 90% market shares, not because the markets remain distorted, but because fair competition is a new concept and it’s taking a while to fund and believe in rivals.
There are few places like this remaining in Europe, where a system can be designed for IPTV, for an incumbent both large enough and sophisticated enough, and yet who has not yet taken the plunge into IPTV.
Most European capitals have not one, but often two or three IPTV incumbents, which is why there is little opportunity to do what Airties has done, test new ideas and shift business models from WiFi home gateways to IPTV set tops and on to full a DLNA Media Gateway product, which it also launched this week, which is one of the most advanced such devices anywhere.
And yet the culture here, 97% Muslim (Islam), with a conservative Government, which has only just banned public smoking and only just allowed foreigners to have ownership of property, is perhaps off-putting enough to have stopped just any old European set top specialist waltzing in and stealing the incumbent business. At the rate at which Turkey is westernizing, this will not be long for too long, and Airties is probably just in time with its bid for the IPTV market.
‘So far IPTV is just 20% of our total revenue, but by this time next year it will be over 50%,’ says B’lent ‘elebi, CEO of Airties.
Now we can hear the collective intake of breath and shaking of heads, from all over Europe, especially from set top makers everywhere, but these guys are clever and they genuinely do have a shot. And while they are not geniuses or head and shoulders above say the technical guys at Celeno or Pace or Motorola or Amino, and they are Johnny come Lately’s to the IPTV business, they are at the leading edge of what will be a big shake out. The home gateway and the set top markets are merging, and may also absorbing home media storage devices too, to become either one device network or certainly a single homogenous network, and Airties is out of the starting block as one of the first runners.
Can we imagine anyone from the set top business incorporating advanced video wireless capabilities? Well yes, but not easily, because video over WiFi is not easy. Ruckus was the first business to ship devices in Europe which would reliably carry an SD video signal around a home. To do this it needed to offer multiple MIMO antennas and use beamforming, but also it used packet resends, all done outside of the main WiFi chip and the result costing quite a lot of money. Later Ruckus introduced a HD version of this and took it back to the US, where HD was mandated on all pay TV operator RFPs.
But none of the main set top makers included anything similar in their device back then, and Pace is perhaps the only set top vendor far sighted enough and with enough sway at operators, to begin to push that idea. But then again Pace is the biggest set top vendor in the world, so you’d expect that. And we’re sure there will be an unholy alliance between all these elements ‘ set top and home gateway, at the other major set top firms ‘ Technicolor, Motorola and of course Cisco.
This is perhaps why so many major operators have been so keen on Celeno, the Israeli start-up, which says that it can do all of what Airties is doing, but all on software which runs on its own chip. That type of capability means that set top makers could choose to leave all of the hard design thinking to Celeno and plug in a reliable tested device which takes care of the networking side of things. But so far Celeno is in early days and while it has signed China Telecom and Liberty Global, it has yet to deliver anything through them.
What both Celeno and Airties are doing is sending HD video over WiFi without packet loss ‘ comfortably. For years we have been saying that this is tough to do, and it is, but while we have all been looking at WirelessHD, 60 GHz WiGig, and Amimon’s WHDI, common or garden variety WiFi has been getting better and better.
The tricks Airties uses are similar to Celeno’s. You take a 2 x 2 or higher MIMO version of a WiFi 802.11N chip off the shelf (from Broadcom) and you write firmware which allows it to dynamically sniff each of the radio channels in 5GHz and decide which of the 22 available will best allow the next set of packets you are planning to send to reach their destination unhampered by interference. And you repeat this logic several times each second and achieve a throughput of some 300Mbps. You can also carry out predictive calculations to check that the channel is clear enough to ensure the send, and identify video packets and put them in a Quality of Service stream.
The router starts by using the clearest available channel when it first comes up. From that point on, all other channels are periodically sampled for quality. The information gathered on the other channels helps decide which channel to switch to when the channel currently being used can no longer support real-time video transmission. Airties also has its own mesh design which helps it route traffic around concrete walls rather than trying to go through them.
Whereas the Celeno system makes it clear that it doesn’t care what kind of client it is speaking to, which means that it can slot into existing set ups, Airties makes a feature out of supplying the entire network, so that each node comes from Airties and this makes it easier to organize packet resends and calculate if they are worthwhile sending. The technology was shown this week supporting 12 TV screens with separate streams, all of them perfect in a combination of fixed bit IPTV delivery and adaptive streaming from the internet.
Certainly hard wired systems like MoCA and other ‘no new wires’ technologies such as G.hn will have their place. There will certainly be a marriage between HomePlug AV and WiFi which will potentially use the power system in a home as a backbone and WiFi to handle the final step. There will be 60 GHz single room technologies too, both WirelessHD and WiGig. But we can’t have all of that tomorrow, and anyway, any such system will be tightly integrated between set tops or Blu-ray players and screens. You will still need WiFi in the home to send video files in order to incorporate portable devices.
And as Airties points out, it’s software layers are independent of the PHY you use to send traffic, so it can adapt to each of these technologies using the same networking firmware.
The three main news points that Airties made this week was a set top and home gateway deal with TTNet, the arrival of a new wireless media gateway product based on the Intel CE 4200 chip, which it says will massively reduce the cost of multi room DVRs and the fact that it is setting up shop in the UK next.
AirTies says that it can offer any kind of hybrid set top and home gateway, whether that is pure IPTV with over the internet adaptive streaming delivery, which it has made for TTNet, or for cable and satellite operators, and it demonstrated the DLNA nature of the home network by moving content between a PS3, a hard disk drive, a Blu-ray player and both Sony and Samsung internet connected TVs. It also showed off its Air 4420 video bridge.
This simple little device just uses all that firmware to replace wires and will come to market in the UK at the £80 plus mark for a pair, rivaling HomePlug pricing. It allows high-definition video to be distributed across the home wirelessly and it will form one of the main UK product launches, as well as being part of the TTNet deal and is also brand new.
A disproportionate amount of time talk to Airties is spent discussing the fact that consumers need to be able to install this kind of equipment themselves and that it needs to be exceptionally simple. One idea that Airties has pinched from the original HomePlug designs, is to simply push a big red button on a wireless device, and then go to the other device and push the same red button and the two would then begin talking to one another and that’s just how this video bridge works. They take 90 seconds to swap encryption keys, check what devices they are attached to, and load up on any other software they will need for the two to converse. And then they can send video to one another. Could my granny set this up without help? No, because Granny won’t even open the box without help, in case she loses half the bits and pieces, but her helpful 10 year old Grandson will have no problems with it.
The new home media gateway will not come out until next quarter at best and even then the first version will only be for IPTV but it might just as easily be built in DVB-T, DVB-C or DVB-S versions and there are plans to offer a DVB-T hybrid in the UK as that opens for business.
It’s capable of working with up to 8 tuners and works by reducing all tuned programming into MPEG transport streams and encapsulating them as IP traffic. It can then send them to as many as three further thin client IP-only set-top-boxes for viewing.
The big cost reduction for pay TV operators is that this does away with the MoCA or Ethernet wiring, which can cost a lot to deploy. MoCA talks about being no new wires, but all multi-room DVR installations imply wires where none have been before.
The very first DTCP-IP multiroom DVR came out of DirecTV in the US and it has been a smash hit and this uses the same technology ‘ the conditional access in the gateway decrypts commercial content, and then re-encrypts it using something called an elliptic curve digital signature. DTCP-IP is a technique for allowing the thin client set top and the media gateway to openly swap keys in a WiFi environment without worrying about having these keys intercepted and deciphered. But it is seen very much as the right way to go by the 24 or so major CE companies and partner which make up the DNLA leadership, and creates a protected home domain of devices. There are many of these planned and DLNA says that it has certified over 5,000 home based device models for DLNA interworking, but none of these have this DTCP-IP already built in says Airties.
Another key function for the wireless gateway is that it brings the internet to connected TVs or other devices. One of the reasons that Airties wants to launch next in the UK is because of the arrival of YouView, once known as Canvas. The first generation of devices for this are already designed and not one of them has WiFi in it, we are reliably told. This is because common or garden WiFi loses lots of packets and video can break up when it is sent this way, so YouView set tops and DVRs will all need new wiring installed. But using the Airties 4420 Air Bridge this can be avoided and so Airties will sell it via UK retailers and hopes to position it side by side with YouView.
One of the reasons that Airties chose to use the Intel CE 4200, was because of the tremendous amount of processing that is going on, not just in DLNA format conversions, but also in its own algorithms for selecting safe WiFi channels and encapsulating DVB protocols. There’s a lot going on in this set up and the idea is that the consumer never really has to understand or wait for any of it. The Media Gateway can manages 8 streams as we said, because more and more home streams will be needed ‘ one child using an iPad, another watching TV on their laptop, plus two adults watching two TVs, both of which are also recording a program.
While the rival Celeno chipset is supposed to use a complex ARM 9 core to manage all its complex WiFi channel management, it would take one of the new dual-core 1.5 GHz chips, delivering 3 GHz of processing cycles, to manage everything that the Atom CE 4200 delivers on. So how will companies like Broadcom, which have long been the favorite in many of these devices ‘ DVD players, set tops, home gateways, WiFi routers ‘ cope with this increased processing requirement. It uses the old MIPs cores in its product and is more familiar with 400 MHz than multi GHz, so it has some way to go, to line itself up against Intel in this space. We’re sure it will manage this, but it hasn’t addressed it as yet.
Another thing that using the DTCP-IP protocol gives you is the ability to use any old disk drives with commercial programming, and the system was demonstrated with a simple, cheap USB plug in hard drive.
The Airties journey may owe it’s antecedents to Silicon Valley and California, but right now its impact will next be felt in Europe, coming from the unfamiliar direction of the East.