CenturyTel to expand IPTV service

CenturyTel announced it would be expanding its IPTV service to more communities within its service footprint, testing the market to determine if it will do a full-scale rollout of IPTV services in the territory it got through its acquisition of Embarq last year. CenturyTel, which has been operating a pilot IPTV program in La Crosse, Wis., for the past four years, said it plans to extend the service beyond that area by using bonded ASDL2+ broadband lines.

"We're considering a couple of what we call ‘IPTV-lite' trials in the coming months, based on 10-megabit [per second] speeds," CenturyTel CEO Glen Post said Thursday on the company's earnings call. "We've had a lot of success in La Crosse without HDTV, without DVR. We'll trial in a couple other markets that aren't very dense, where we don't have the broadband speed capabilities to get the 25 Mb/s to 30 Mb/s we expect to get in more dense markets. We'll be doing some work in very selective cases in our markets this year."

Post added that areas in the Embarq footprint are more densely populated than CenturyTel's traditional markets, which could possibly make an IPTV offering more attractive and feasible. 

For more:
- see the Telephony report here 

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