Volume 47 No. 4 DECEMBER 2025
The Dark Side of Digital Inclusion DIGITAL INCLUSION Cover art [Credit: Melissa Cogavin]
n SCTE® Presents: TV to IP - The Full Story n Agentic AI Plumbing Problem n Circular Economy’s Opportunities n Rare Earths - Are we at rock bottom? n Plus: We talk to STL, GreySky, Nokia, SCCI Alphatrack and Fritz!
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• Optical Distribution • Cable Management • And More!
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contents
VOLUME 47 NO. 4 - DECEMBER 2025
editorial Editor’s Letter Welcome to the December 2025 issue of Broadband Journal.
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from the scte SCTE News All the latest news and events from the SCTE.
ISSN 1751-0791
4 Network Perspective Phil Scott, Chief Sales Officer at Technetix, shares his take on the fast-changing world of telecoms and how it intersects with technology. 8 scte presents Julian Clover, editor of Broadband TV News, recently reported on our very successful SCTE ® Presents: Across The Pond evnt in June. 10
Thanks to our supporters The SCTE ® is grateful to the following supporters for their continued support of Broadband Journal: Amphenol, ANGA, Connected Britain, Technetix, Webro and Wisi.
scte member focus Mike Gannon, VP, Access Architecture and Sales Engineering, Vecima Networks Inc scte bursary report Flutura Sadiku, IT Specialist/Consultant, Arding, IBC2025 Bursary Award Winner
SCTE ® - The Society for Broadband Professionals
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Officers and Members of the Executive Committee President and Chair Dr Anthony Basham FSCTE Vice President Dave Hodges FSCTE Director Dr Roger Blakeway FSCTE Secretary Beverley Walker FIAM Members Laura Baskeyfield, Keith Bail, Melissa Cogavin, Costas Kyriacou, Peter Sealey, Chris Swires and Peter Veerman
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scte benelux news Benelux News All the latest news and events from the SCTE’s Benelux Group. scte balkans news SCTE Balkans Update from Besim Latifi, our Ambassador-At-Large
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from the industry Industry News The latest global news from the industry. scte long read Digital Inclusion: Coming to a Smart TV Near You
SCTE ® Communications House, 41a Market Street, Watford, Hertfordshire WD18 0PN, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1923 815500
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office@theSCTE.eu www.theSCTE.eu
Rebuilding Value: How Reverse Logistics and Circular Models are Redefining the Technology Lifecycle
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The Remarkable Journey of James Saunby 42 Boom or bust Why America’s AI revolution won’t happen without the right kind of infrastructure 46 Leading the Charge: STL’s Rahul Puri on Data Centres, Green Hydrogen and the Future of Connectivity 48 Life in the Fast LAN 52 Why 5G Isn’t the Revolution We Expected* 56 The Blind Spot at the Heart of the Digital Age 60 Redefining Live Streaming with the Power of Multiview 64 The Fibre Deadlock: Building Safety Regulations and the Digital Divide 68 Networks for AI, AI for Networks Nokia’s Paul Alexander on the Future of Connectivity 72 Broadband Land: A Tech Playground for Innovation at SCTE TECHEXPO25 76 Women in Telecom: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 80 The Hidden Headaches of Fibre Networks and the Smart Fixes Emerging to Solve Them 82
Managing Editor Melissa Cogavin Tel: +44 (0)7501 780342 melissa@theSCTE.eu
Publisher Evolution Print & Design Ltd 143 Cavendish Road, Leicester LE2 7PJ, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 116 274 7700 sales@evolutiondc.co.uk
Broadband Journal is published on behalf of the SCTE ® (Society for Broadband Professionals) by Evolution Print and Design Ltd. Neither the editor nor the Society, as a body, is responsible for expression of opinion appearing in the journal unless otherwise stated. Papers and contributions for consideration for publication in Broadband or for reading at meetings are welcome and should be sent to Melissa Cogavin. Letters Broadband Journal is your forum for debate on issues affecting the industry. Let us have your news and views. Write to The Editor, c/o Communications House, marking your letter ‘for publication’ or email melissa@theSCTE.eu. For reasons of space, we reserve the right to edit letters published in Broadband .
technical Internet Traffic and Humpty Dumpty
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Measuring Video Quality Using AI Why It’s Relevant and Reliable startup zone Impact PMO Enabling Smarter Delivery Across Infrastructure and Digital Transformation
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NETOAI Building the AI Native Future of Telecom
© 2025 Broadband Journal Information in Broadband Journal may not be reproduced, changed or used without prior written permission from the SCTE ® .
spotlight The often overlooked last mile: Network Layer 4 / In-house network by By AND Solution GmbH 100
industry events ANGA COM 2026 19 to 21 May: High Demand for Stand Space
102 104 106 108
The INCA Summit & Awards 2025
Dressing for the weather: Technology, Business, and the Human Side of IBC
Total Telecom ExCel Again!
acronym explainer
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products Detachable Fibre Connector Solutions on GF Fotonix to Scale Next-Generation Optical Connectivity 112
service finder
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diary dates
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Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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EDITORial
Editor’s Letter
The Long Read on page 30 this time delves into the complexities of digital inclusion; who is being left behind, why, what the effects are and what is being done to address it. An awful lot, as it turns out. Thanks to all the amazing people I spoke to in the writing of this piece. Technical papers are becoming more difficult to source; a reflection of the maturity of the industry no doubt, but you’ll enjoy John Nolan’s piece on page 84, ‘Internet Traffic and Humpty Dumpty’, as well as a contribution from Spirent, ‘Measuring Video Quality Using AI’. I was fortunate enough to sit down and interview our new Corporate Members Fritz!, James Saunby, Mike Gannon, Dario Betti, our friends at Nokia and Rahul Puri of STL. We welcome contributions from Phil Scott on page 8, Harmonic give us the background to their dreamy, sugarcoated stand at TechExpo (p76), Victoria D’Arcy on sustainability (p 38), Amanda Van Dyke frightens us again on rare earth minerals on page 60 and Steve Chesterman from SCCI talks us through the issues running fibre into MDUs (p68). Finally we welcome AND Digital to the Spotlight section (p100),and two of the companies we met at Connected Britain contribute to our Startup Zone on page 96. Which brings me to wishing all of you a very happy Christmas, enjoy your downtime over the festive period and have a very peaceful and prosperous new year!
Last issue of 2025 – that went quickly didn’t it? By now we are all a bit jaded and looking forward to a rest over Christmas. It’s been a frantic few months and usually this issue reflects a quiet phase the industry experiences generally. Not this time, you’re in for a treat. Grab a mince pie, put the kettle on. In October our SCTE® Presents: TV to IP – The Capacity Challenge was a big success and we have an extensive, twelve-page feature on page 10 detailing the topics covered, questions raised and highlights from the day. We are also busy working on our next event, SCTE® Presents: Testing & Measurement, taking place on January 22 2026 at One Great George Street in London. More on that on page 21, don’t leave it too late as places are limited and this event will be popular. You’ll see some news from us on page 4 where we welcome new Executive Committee member Ian Nock further to October’s AGM. We also are delighted to introduce Julie Harriss and Keera Miller- Howe, who you’ll also read about on page 4. Since September it’s been a really busy few months for us all and we loved seeing so many of you at IBC, Connected Britain, TechExpo and the INCA Summit – you can see a write up of our experiences on page 102. Our bursary winner Flutura Sadiku from Kosovo has written the loveliest piece on page 24 about what bursaries have done for her - members are entitled to this so please use this excellent benefit!
Melissa Cogavin Broadband Journal SCTE ® , Society for Broadband Professionals melissa@theSCTE.eu www.theSCTE.eu
Melissa Cogavin
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
SCTE 81 st Annual Gala Dinner & Awards 2026
Saturday 20th June 2026
SAVE THE DATE. details will be circulated to members very shortly but in the meantime more information can be obtained from the SCTE office or by emailing bev@theSCTE.eu CENTRAL LONDON
scte news Welcome to the Executive Committee, Ian Nock!
Beyond the day job, Ian’s a Fellow of the SCTE and active in the IET, IEEE and SMPTE. He’s also been chairing the Ultra HD Forum Interoperability Working Group since 2017, helping sort out the practical challenges of getting high-quality video from production to your screen, regardless of how it gets there. What really gets Ian excited is pushing the SCTE into the future of broadband entertainment and communications. As he puts it, “The modern broadband engineer must enable advanced applications as well as connectivity.” He’s passionate about helping the industry—and SCTE members—build smarter, more capable networks that can handle whatever comes next. Welcome aboard, Ian. We’re looking forward to seeing where you’ll help take us.
We’re thrilled to announce that Ian Nock has joined the SCTE Executive Committee, bringing with him over 25 years of hands-on experience in the broadband and cable trenches. As Managing Consultant at Fairmile West, Ian’s been everywhere in the network stack—from core infrastructure right through to what’s happening in your living room. He’s had his fingerprints on cable, IPTV, satellite and OTT platforms across more than 20 countries, working with heavyweights like Liberty Global, Virgin Media, Deutsche Telekom and plenty of others you’d recognise. If you’ve used an EOS/TiVo V6 or Horizon set-top box, there’s a good chance Ian had something to do with making it work. He’s been deep in the weeds on everything from broadband gateways and home networking to hybrid cable/IPTV deployments and cloud video platforms— basically, if it delivers video or broadband to your home, Ian’s probably worked on something like it.
SCTE Welcomes Julie and Keera!
Keera says, “The SCTE is an impressive organisation in an exciting, evolving industry, and I am doing what I love best – marketing, events, social media. I’m really looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings.”
great to be back. I am really excited by what’s happening in this industry and look forward to getting to know you all better,” Julie says. Keera joined the SCTE in August as Digital Marketing Assistant; she’s already produced a podcast for us and will be creating and executing marketing campaigns across all our verticals.
Many of you will already be familiar with Julie Harriss, who has helped organise our SCTE® Presents events – Julie has a long background in event organisation, publishing and media and is responsible for sponsorship and event planning alongside Melissa Cogavin and has helped to organise our three most recent SCTE Presents. “Melissa and I have worked together closely in the past – it’s
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
SCTE NEWS SCTE Welcomes New Members
What’s next? “We want to continue our international expansion, to ensure that as many ISPs and end users as possible can benefit from the advantages our products have to offer,” says Carl Bartlett. “That includes the UK, where I am currrently reaching out to existing as well as new partners.”
the company produced and offered ISDN cards, reaching a market share of approx. 80% in Germany. In 2004, the first FRITZ!Box router was launched. Nowadays, FRITZ! products are in high demand across Europe, making FRITZ! one of the leaders in Europe when it comes to broadband internet and digital home solutions. In 2024, the company had 900 employees and generated a turnover of 630 million Euros. “FRITZ! products are very easy to use and stand for innovation and versatility: Whether it’s fast internet access, easy networking, powerful Wi-Fi, convenient telephony or clever smart home applications: FRITZ! connects you simply and reliably. The FRITZ!OS software is being updated regularly, thereby offering new features - and it keeps all products up-to-date and secure for many years.
The SCTE welcomed Germany’s leading manufacturer of broadband devices as its latest Corporate Member in October; UK Provider Sales Manager Carl Bartlett spoke to Broadband Journal about the company’s journey and why they have joined the SCTE: “We have joined the SCTE because it’s a great organisation that offers its members unique opportunities to connect with partners and industry leaders. Its presence across Europe, including at events such as ANGA COM and Connected Britain, means that we can reach out to new partners and extend our network.” Tell us a bit about your company. “FRITZ! (formerly known as AVM) was founded in 1986 in Berlin. In the 1990s,
Read about Fritz! in full in an interview with Carl Bartlett on page 52.
www.fritz.com
We are also delighted to welcome the following individual members:
GEORGE DYCKES has sadly stepped down from the SCTE Executive Committee after several years as his career takes a new direction. We thank him for his hard work and excellent, creative contributions to the SCTE over the years and wish him every success in the future.
Justin Hewelt Director PayMedia Consulting Ltd Keith Chow Senior Product Manager (Network Infrastructure - IP Networks) Nokia
Justin Leese Chief Technology and Operations Officer Ogi Erin McEwan Account Executive VIAVI Solutions Daniel Winterton Sales & Marketing Director Antiference Ltd
Lorenc Koci Fiber Technician Fiberex
See your name here for the March issue and contact office@thescte.eu today!
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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scte news SCTE® Presents: TV to IP
You may be wondering how our recent event SCTE® Presents: TV to IP went – well it was such a success we have made a 10-page feature of it in this issue rather than hide it in the news section. Turn to page 10 for details.
SCTE at…
We came away from a rainy Amsterdam so inspired we are devoting a whole day to The Future of Streaming on 18 June, 2026 at One Great George Street in London , early enough in the summer to reach our friends on the media and entertainment side of the business, late enough to be relevant for the IBC that will follow on in September. If you would like to get involved in this as a speaker, panelist or sponsor, drop us a line – we are at the planning stages of this and would be delighted to hear from you: sctepresents@thescte.eu. As Official Magazine Partner again we worked closely with the team at Total Telecom to support their Startup Village and over the course of the next year you’ll see two start-ups featured in each issue of Broadband Journal. You can see Netoai and Impactpmo detailed on page 96. Congrats to the team at Total Telecom for another fantastic event, see you next year! impressed we asked them to send details of their creative journey, in glorious Candy Crush technicolor, which you can read all about on page 76. We met some amazing people, heard some incredible stories, learned a lot about the US landscape and not least, our President Anthony Basham was inducted as a Cable Pioneer in recognition of his years of dedication to the industry. Along with 33 new members
We had another excellent few days in Amsterdam at IBC as Official Magazine Partner, dazzled by the innovation, catching up with old friends, making some fantastic new contacts, meeting our bursary winners. Congratulations to the team at IBC for turning out another astonishing event. Our good friend Fiorenza Mella from Xpresso Communications feels the same way, and has articulated just how special IBC is on page 106. Onto another excellent couple of days shortly afterwards and the UK telecoms industry gathered in numbers at the ExCel in London for Connected Britain. Buzzing and very busy, Rob Chambers put it well in our interview with him on page 108 when he said the show is evolving in the same way as the industry. “People want to talk more and more about how connectivity is being used rather than just how they build out the connectivity.” A fascinating and worthwhile experience to see TechExpo in its Washington DC location this time, and it is always great to see our North American friends there – ATX, Amphenol, Calix, Corning, Calix, CommScope, Qorvo, Openvault, PPC, Rincon, Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center, Technetix and not forgetting Harmonic, whose stand honestly defies description. Broadband Journal was so
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
SCTE NEWS
records with the greatest number of nominations resulting in one of our largest, if not the largest, class of new, distinguished Pioneers.” Anthony Basham said, “This is a great honour, and I am humbled to have received this award. The Cable Pioneers does an exceptional job recognising the work so many people have done in making the industry what it is today.”
in its Class of 2025 at its 59th Annual Banquet during the show, this year’s class included a variety of leaders and achievers from broadband, new media, content, technology, distribution and allied fields who have made a significant impact on the growth and prosperity of the industry. “It’s a spectacular class that reflects the innovation and commitment that makes our industry great,” said Pioneer Chairman Jim Gleason. “This year we broke all the
Tony being inducted as a member of the Cable TV Pioneers in Washington alongside Matt Polka (left) and Jim Gleason (right).
SCTE® Presents: Testing & Measurement January 22, One Great George Street, London SW1
We have decided to offer one of these events every three months for 2026 so put January 22 in your diaries. This one focuses on Testing & Measurement, and spans network build, network testing, delivery testing and the user experience. Full details on page 21. Places are limited and likely to go quickly, so secure your place today
www.thescte.eu
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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NETWORK PERSPECTIVE
Phil Scott’s
Network Perspective
Phil Scott, Chief Sales Officer at Technetix, shares his take on the fast-changing world of telecoms and how it intersects with technology. With a wealth of industry experience, he brings fresh, insightful and funny perspectives on the people, ideas and innovations that shape our industry.
the banks of the River Thames triggered three separate outbreaks of cholera. Then, as now, a problem that mounted with time and lack of attention had far reaching consequences. According to AI itself, “Agentic AI represents a shift from passive, prompt- driven AI to autonomous systems that reason, plan, act and iterate to achieve goals with minimal human intervention.” As long as nobody mentions Skynet, it seems this shift will happen in the same understated way that LLMs were first introduced in our lives. But is it really a shift? According to Gartner, 70% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2026. And if we believe Reece Hayden of ABI research then they aren’t really “agentic” projects at all, “just dressed-up generative workflows”. At a recent 18th birthday party for one of my family members, the main discussion topic was not “which shot are we doing next?” or “who should really win this series of love island?”, but
Agentic AI and the Invisible Plumbing Problem Eighteen months ago, one of my sales team who was well versed in AI predicted that the next wave of high-salary employees would be prompt engineers – capable of eliciting from ChatGPT and other LLMs what mere mortals could not. Just a year and a half later, having dinner at a lovely canal-side restaurant in Amsterdam, it was declared that “agentic AI has already killed the prompt engineer”. Such is the speed at which AI is moving that we can barely keep up. However, one thing remains a potential thorn in the side for the collective noun, ‘AI’, that describes anything remotely futuristic. That thorn can be associated with a term dating back to Victorian times as “The Great Stink”. Sewer systems were all the rage in 1858, but poor forward planning, exacerbated by the hot weather of that year, meant the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent present on
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
NETWORK PERSPECTIVE
5G promised us flying cars, but what we got was better backhaul
AI faces the same challenge. The models themselves are extraordinary. Nobody doubts the leap forward in reasoning and autonomy. But the hard part isn’t the algorithms, it’s clearing the invisible bars that sit beneath them. Telecoms learned long ago that service levels and accountability can’t be left to chance; AI will need its own equivalent of SLAs before it can scale. Alongside the governance and process, there is also the physical needs of a scaling AI ecosystem. The most valuable companies in the world can build as many data centres as they like, but if the rest of the infrastructure isn’t there, nothing works for the average consumer. 5G promised us flying cars, but what we got was better backhaul. It was a precondition
“who is responsible when a driverless car injures someone in a crash?” It was about governance, accountability and data quality. The physics of going from prompts to autonomous actions adds layers of risk, governance and cost. Layers that standard LLMs don’t need to worry about, but layers that agentic AI will never navigate safely without proper oversight. And this brings us back to why this article appears in the SCTE’s Broadband Journal and not the latest SaaS publication. If historic telecom innovation has taught us anything, it’s that these hidden layers are where real failure hides. Because of these layers, the bar to entering the telecoms arena is as high as Duplantis’s new pole vault world record. And agentic
to the shiny product that was casually overlooked. Agentic AI could be the same: sold as a wild night of disruption, but in practice it may end up folding the laundry. Sexy in the pitch, mundane in the deployment. Yet it’s the everyday graft that separates the one-night stands from the long-term partners. In telecoms, plumbing means ducts, fibre routes and switches. The infrastructure no one sees but everyone depends on. AI needs its own plumbing in governance, data pipelines, integrations and monitoring. Without them, even the smartest agents will collapse under their own weight. Just as Victorian London only thrived once it fixed its sewers, the AI revolution will live or die on what happens below the surface. The telecoms lesson is clear: scale alone isn’t enough. For those who read my previous article, take TalkTalk’s recent breakup as a case in point. The consumer brand, burdened by slim margins and a rapidly changing market, struggled to stay relevant while its wholesale arm thrived because it sat on valuable, investable infrastructure. Those who poured capital into the hidden layers of the network created lasting value and those who chased scale without shoring up the foundations found themselves vulnerable. The same principle applies to AI: success will follow the builders, not the flashy front-ends. Victorian London only took sewage seriously after the Great Stink. AI governance might need its own ‘stink moment’ before we get serious about the plumbing.
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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scte PRESENTS
SCTE ® PRESENTS: TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Julian Clover, editor of Broadband TV News, recently reported on our very successful SCTE ® Presents: TV to IP Challenge event in October. His expert insight into the key developments and discussions that took place over the course of the day make this a great read if you were there, and an even greater read if you weren’t. Enjoy!
8 th October 2025 The Institute of Civil Engineers, One Great George Street, London
The October SCTE Presents was as much a reflection of changes with the technologies handled by SCTE members as it was a guidebook to the profound changes in UK distribution technologies that await us. SCTE President, Dr Anthony Basham outlined the UK and other markets are moving towards switching off digital terrestrial and satellite TV. In future, mass- market TV will no longer be broadcast over the air or via satellite but delivered over broadband. That shift is already under way, and it creates major challenges. Networks must handle simultaneous peak traffic for live events and on-demand usage, he said. Capacity, bandwidth, caching, distribution, energy use, sustainability, operations and business models all must evolve – including how this new world will be monetised.
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
scte PRESENTS
TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 1: Education, Education, Education
UK OTT subscriptions jumped from 21 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2024 and are projected to hit 60 million within five years. Penetration of traditional pay TV in the UK has fallen from 62% in 2014 to 49% in 2024 and is forecast to keep sliding. Advertising is following: at ITV, digital ad revenue has grown from 14% of total to 26%, even as the value of traditional broadcast spot advertising declines. The economics of TV are clearly moving online, whether distribution and infrastructure are ready or not.
The message from the opening Education session was consistent: the UK is in the middle of a structural shift from broadcast to IP television, but that shift exposes economic, technical and social fault lines that have not yet been resolved.
Mo Hamza, Research Director at S&P Global (Kagan TMT), took us through the UK’s fibre story over the past five
years; defined by aggressive ambition, cheap money and now consolidation. He said the UK had seen more than 100 fibre companies appear, all aiming to build full-fibre broadband networks. Many never made it to meaningful deployment. Those that did now face higher borrowing costs, post-Covid economic pressure and heavy overbuild – multiple networks chasing the same streets. Unlike France, where fibre rollout was coordinated, Hamza said the UK has effectively been “a free for all”. The result is a patchwork of overlapping networks and stressed balance sheets. “You can see the premises passed and the penetration. At one point we were looking at something like over 60 to 80 million premises planned for fibre in the UK, which is ridiculous given that we have 30 million premises.” Even so, fibre coverage and penetration are improving. Hamza noted that the UK historically lagged Western Europe on full-fibre but is catching up as Openreach, Virgin Media O2, CityFibre and the other altnets push deeper. At the same time the delivery of television is being reshaped by streaming services which have moved direct-to-consumer and inserted themselves into operator bundles. Across Western Europe, Netflix is now the most integrated third-party app within pay- TV and platform environments, followed by Prime Video, Disney, and HBO. Additionally, pay-TV is changing significantly, general entertainment is migrating to subscription VOD (SVOD), advertising VOD (AVOD), YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. This largely leaves sport for the traditional pay-TV operators, and even that is under threat.
DTG director-general Richard Lindsay-Davies asked if we were ready for the transition. The UK has already gone from
in an IP world; the Media Act, which is the first major UK media legislation since 2003 and is explicitly about protecting public service media in a digital environment; and the DCMS Future of Television Distribution Forum, which is due to wrap up this year. Once the findings are made public, government will have to make hard choices: how fast to push into IP, how to protect audiences who can’t or won’t migrate, and how to support public service broadcasting in a commercial environment that looks more like YouTube than Freeview. The DTG recently studied how older viewers interact with modern TV interfaces. The findings were blunt. Older
analogue to digital, and now sits in a hybrid world of broadcast plus IP. The next move, he said, is towards all-IP television. Government has not yet fixed a date. He suggested 2034 as a potential date but stressed it could be later. What matters is that when TV is “put on the Internet, it will follow Internet rules”. That means global platforms, global ad models and global competition. He pointed to three active processes in the UK: Ofcom’s forthcoming work on how TV advertising should be regulated
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scte PRESENTS participants, even those who considered themselves “good with tech”, became visibly anxious navigating today’s app- driven smart TV home screens. They struggled with scrolling menus, branded tiles and ad-led UIs. Confidence collapsed further when they were asked to find content via an app and collapsed again when asked to use on-screen text search. By contrast, giving them a remote and letting them press “1” to get BBC One immediately calmed them. Lindsay-Davies argued that if you remove the simplicity of channel numbers and familiar navigation, you will strand part of the audience. Voice search was highlighted as a surprising win: once a participant accidentally triggered microphone input and spoke naturally, their frustration dropped. Xavier LeClercq of Broadpeak focused on capacity. His argument was that IP can absolutely deliver “TV-grade” live events – but only if networks are engineered like motorways on race day, not like city streets at rush hour. He illustrated this using live sport. In India, the IPL cricket now peaks at around 55 million concurrent streaming users, which equates to roughly 100 terabits per second of traffic. That’s already beyond what a typical national network in the UK could comfortably absorb today. And yet even that is still only a fraction of total IPL viewing, the networks saved before the boundary by the amount of mobile viewing to the contest, with broadcast TV still catching an audience of more than 160 million.
premium live events. DAZN was allowed to ride this path too when it acquired top-tier football rights in Italy, giving OTT sports a broadcast-like quality of experience. LeClercq was asked what would happen in a geopolitical shock should UKTV become fully dependent on global CDNs and global cloud networks? He replied that broadcasters in places like Norway are already asking for sovereign delivery: the ability to keep serving video to their own citizens even if the country were, in effect, cut off from the wider internet. The implication is more national or operator- owned distribution infrastructure, not less.
To handle this kind of volume, Indian operator Reliance built its own CDN inside its network, rather than relying entirely on global third-party CDNs. The goal is to localise traffic flows, cut transit cost and avoid choke points. LeClercq described a second model: multicast ABR (adaptive bitrate). Instead of sending a unique unicast stream to each viewer, the operator uses IP multicast in the core of the network to move one version of the channel efficiently, then converts it back into individual unicast streams inside the home.
Telecom Italia uses this approach to keep latency and buffering down during
TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 2: Technical: Spreading the load
deduplicating popular traffic deep in the access network. BT is also preparing for low latency at scale. In an IBC Accelerator using L3D DASH, segment request instances fell to around 120ms, a big shift from the 2-10s segment world that stresses CDNs and control loops. Finally, BT is aligning QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) congestion signals with ABR ladders to deliver paced, less “spiky” throughput, smoothing the ride when multiple congestion controls (transport, player, even appliance-level) collide.
in UHD) produces a working peak-load assumption of approximately 375tbps nationally – a “monster” that Stevens says must be tamed, financially and ecologically. BT’s main bet is MAUD (multicast- assisted unicast delivery), developed in partnership with Broadpeak. Without changing the player, a lightweight CDN- to-CDN and publisher integration swaps the heavy segment payload onto multicast while keeping HTTP header transactions unicast. An edge proxy in the home gateway stitches headers and payload,
Could football break the internet? Not if you have enough terabytes.
BT’s Andy Stevens opened the technical
panel with a reality check: as viewing migrates from DTT to OTT, network
peaks will grow sharper and taller. BT has tracked six years of broadband usage and sees clear football-driven traffic spikes when matches are streamed and troughs when they’re on terrestrial channels. Extrapolating a full slate of popular linear channels (assumed to be
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Sky’s principal CDN architect Iuniana Oprescu cautioned there’s no one- size-fits-all fix. Sky will “do more of what works” by
going deeper on multi-CDN, spread very large live loads across more players, and collaborate earlier on event forecasts. Oprescu is sceptical that multicast is economical for Sky today given device diversity and the need for industry-wide adoption. Perhaps unusually for Sky, Oprescu doesn’t just point to football, but also Amazon, Netflix and game downloads as being behind network peaks. Hardware is racing ahead, but “terabits in a rack” scares operators: when a super- dense node fails, redistribution hurts. Oprescu also highlighted UDP-based approaches that don’t play by TCP’s congestion rules; they’re a rounding error now, but at 80-90% of traffic would create network fairness headaches. She sees scope for AI-assisted encoding efficiency and, bigger picture, insists the job is to be invisible: make TV “feel like home”, ergonomic and joyful – technology under the hood, not in the way.
nokia ad
Justin Gupta put the economics in context. As Head of Broadcast & Video Ads, EMEA at Google, he said COVID
took digital adoption forward by four years; linear ad revenue has slid while IP revenues have grown. Some UK broadcasters, such as Channel 4, are tracking towards digital-first by 2030. Broadcasters are also chasing younger audiences on YouTube, monetising there and pulling some back to their own streamers. But scale bites: DAZN’s FIFA Club World Cup hit 7.66 million concurrent streams with one-to-one addressable ads – and remaining feasible up to 10 million, but beyond that cohort- based tactics and multi-CDN offload are required. Gupta’s three questions for full IP were: 1. How to broadcast efficiently at scale (multicast-assist, shared caches); 2. How to digitise legacy platforms without leaving viewers behind (DVBI-style discovery could blend IP channels with broadcast UIs); and 3. What great ad experiences look like (beyond pre-rolls to L-shapes, PiP, shoppable flows) while keeping quality high.
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scte PRESENTS
today’s HLS/DASH, so R&D is betting on multiple horses.
The BBC’s Phil Layton set out R&D’s brief: make the Internet better than broadcast while preserving universality. That means
very difficult to see how to build a good product around DVB-I,” explained Layton.
When it comes to 5G broadcast, the BBC sees limited UK merit versus 5G media streaming; with many device types to serve, Internet-native approaches better fit a universal mission. Turning to business and timelines for a new digital switchover, more themes emerged. Gupta said the oft-cited 2034 end-date for DTT is “aggressive”; the trick is to attract most viewers across well before any hard switch by offering something better. The tail then needs help: low-cost devices, minimum broadband and support schemes – reminiscent of last switchover set-top subsidies – but more complex given today’s fragmented device landscape. Niche and genre DTT channels increasingly resemble FAST channels; for many, IP distribution already makes more sense. Standards like DVB-I can help with service discovery, but implementations must be nuanced and product-driven. “From a BBC perspective, certainly in terms of a hybrid device, which is the most popular at the moment, it was
Among the Codecs: AV1 is spreading; VVC (next gen) is emerging. However, any gains are often soaked up by quality ambitions (UHD/HDR), so aggregate bitrates don’t fall magically. Software decode headroom helps, but long-lived STBs slow uniform adoption. Latency vs experience: an approximate 8s target feels right for mass live; buffering kills faster than delay. In-home desynchronisation across devices still irritates, and social spoilers push some fans towards piracy if friction mounts. Looking ahead, Gupta suggested bandwidth may be swallowed less by 8K than by immersive, addressable, interactive uses (gaming/AR/VR, “screens
scale, resilience and reliability from production-to-player – and sharing what works through open standards. BBC R&D helped develop HLG HDR for live UHD and adopted by Sky, the BBC now runs its own CDN carrying approximately 40% of traffic alongside commercial CDNs. The team is currently running low- latency streaming trials (CMAF, chunked transfer, “seek to live edge”, controlled speed-ups), targeting glass-to-glass delays comparable to broadcast (about 8 seconds from playout to screen). Early results are promising, but devices are often the weak link. Beyond pure delivery, Layton highlighted inclusivity and hyper-personalisation as reasons to go IP: it’s not only about replicating linear but improving it (e.g. richer accessibility than static subs/AD). Layton said there was genuine interest in multicast over QUIC (MoQ) and other new stacks: interest is real, but the BBC expects the 2030s mix to differ from
everywhere”), before the industry optimises again. Siemens expects
renewed value in aggregation: today’s brand-centric silos leave people behind; a unified, familiar experience with multiple navigation modes (numbers, zap, mini- guide, EPG, search) is overdue. Oprescu agreed: make it ergonomic and delightful; if users notice the plumbing, we’ve failed.
Sponsor Presentation: Nokia Advanced IP Broadcasting Technology
Keith Chow, Senior Product Manager, Network Infrastructure – IP Networks, Nokia took time to explain Nokia’s advanced IP broadcasting technology. Developed over 20 years in Bell Labs, it focuses on delivering linear TV over the internet with broadcast- grade reliability and resilience. The technology addresses challenges like latency, packet loss and scalability by using innovative techniques such as route multicast, predictive and adaptive streaming, and deep reinforcement learning.
By employing methods like multicast-to-unicast conversion and intelligent network sensing, Nokia’s solution can maintain stream quality under challenging network conditions, supporting up to 40- 60% random packet loss. The technology has been deployed with tier-one customers and can work across various networks including Wi-Fi, 5G, satellite and high-altitude platforms, offering a unified approach to HD and Ultra HD content delivery.
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TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 3: Capacity & Usability
He argued that many lessons have been forgotten. Early digital UIs evolved towards familiar, multi-path navigation (numbers, zap, mini-guide, full EPG). Modern streaming UIs often narrow users to a single discovery path and prioritise what the service wants viewers to watch, raising friction levels for everyone – not just older audiences. Account set-up and sign-in flows (profiles, codes, passwords) are another barrier on TVs, where typing is painful. Remote control design echoed the same cycle: attempts to “simplify” by stripping buttons frequently made things harder, before operators re-added essentials like number keys, transport controls and clear channel/volume differentiation. On reliability, Nock reminded the room that broadcast isn’t flawless either: DTT is affected by weather, site alignment, trees and even birds on masts; satellite has rain fade. IP has its own Achilles’ heel in UK homes: Wi-Fi propagation through brick and concrete, plus mediocre placement or hiding of routers. He contrasted near- universal 30Mbps line-speed availability with spotty in-home delivery. Latency drew debate. While many consumers tolerate delay, live sports plus social media can make 6-10 seconds feel disruptive, and device-to-device desync within the home is noticeable. Targets around 8 seconds glass-to-glass were cited as reasonable. Walsh cautioned that, in a world where fans already juggle multiple paid services, persistent delay and friction could push some towards piracy – making latency a churn and rights-holder issue as much as a tech metric. Overall, the panel urged a usability agenda that blends broadcast reliability with IP flexibility, reduces user “costs”, respects familiar behaviours, and smoothes discovery and sign-in—meeting viewers where they are, on any device and network.
Our new technology can sometimes leave viewers behind by removing the familiar.
Ampere Analysis’s Hannah Walsh framed “usability” in video as an end-to-end experience, not just a speed test.
According to the analyst, in the UK fibre is set to overtake cable before the end of the year, but many homes still depend on DSL. That matters because time spent has shifted decisively to streaming: subscription OTT has led the way since 2022, while BVOD like iPlayer and ITVX, and free social video now rivals broadcast TV for minutes watched. Device habits are split by age: 18-24s split viewing roughly between smart phones and smart TVs (with frequent second- screen overlap), while 55-64s still prefer traditional TV sets, migrating to smart TVs as they replace their hardware. Walsh proposed thinking about “capacity” as the viewer’s capacity, expressed as four costs: effort (how hard it is to reach content), financial (subscriptions, broadband, equipment, data), technical (how much the home network and devices are made to do) and experiential (buffering, crashes, quality drops vs broadcast). These show up as fragmentation (inconsistent UIs and search), home-network weaknesses (patchy Wi-Fi, underpowered routers, neighbour interference), inequality (gigabit fibre vs DSL or capped mobile data) and complexity (HDMI juggling, multiple passwords, constant updates). Potential remedies include: smarter integration (cross-platform discovery and universal guides), better in-app optimisation to adapt to varying networks without harming perceived quality, “hybrid resilience” that pairs broadcast with IP for scale, reliability and inclusion, and designing for everyone – solutions that work for the least tech-savvy as well as early adopters.
Consultant Ian Nock traced a usability arc from fiddly analogue tuning dials to today’s “computers with fantastic screens”.
TV to IP: Open Session
The closing discussion focused on the future of digital television, particularly the transition from DTT to IP-based
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scte PRESENTS television. Key topics included network capacity, sustainability, content discovery challenges, potential piracy issues and user experience. They highlighted concerns about digital exclusion, particularly for lower- income populations, and debated the complexities of content rights, user interfaces and consumer preferences. One audience member told how he’d discovered one pirate service that had managed to match up foreign TV coverage with local radio commentary. The latency was an issue, but it was still a service unavailable by legal means.
transition. There was an acceptance that the set-top box, or at least the streaming stick, might be with us for some time to come. “Let’s say multiple manufacturers make 3D sticks,” said Nock. “Some of them may even take an ethernet cable and then that’s the solution. We could definitely do that by 2034 if we really have the bandwidth on the Internet.” The conversation revealed that while the IP transition presents challenges, most experts believed the industry is well-positioned to manage the shift, with gradual technological improvements and a focus on user needs.
Ampere’s Hannah Walsh highlighted the issues around picking a new TV when the market was in flux. “It’s impossible to find what the best one out there is,” she said. “You go with the best one in terms of the picture quality because that’s what you might like, or the sound quality paired with picture. Then you find out it comes with voice only operated remote.” “There’s a saying that in the industry that almost nobody buys a television because of the operating system,” quipped consultant Ian Nock.
Participants also explored the need for diverse product options during the
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Event Report Paul Markham Broadcast & Media Technology Leader | Helping Media Navigate Cloud & AI | Event Host | Freelance Writer | AWS Community Builder | Royal Television Society Nominated Inspiring Technologist 2024
Key quotes and takeaways “We will at the right moment transition from broadcast but we don’t yet know what that moment will be” - Richard Lindsay-Davies, Digital TV Group (DTG) emphasising that although certain dates are often discussed, nothing has been decided. “We can’t just focus on the commercial value and ignore the social value” - Xavier Leclercq, Broadpeak, explaining that although operators are focused on commercial issues, the role of television in society is also important and government leadership needs to help the industry ensure no-one is left behind. “The biggest sustainability gain comes from only running one system, not many systems” - Phil Layton, BBC R&D, highlighting the research BBC R&D has done on the environmental impact of different distribution technologies. “Our job is to be invisible” - Iuniana Oprescu, Sky, discussing how successful transitions are opaque to end users and viewers shouldn’t need to know or care about how video reaches them. “We really need to be careful about setting the standards higher than what we’ve had previously” - Ian Nock, Fairmile West Consulting, who articulated the varied history of TV user experience, from manual tuning knobs to co-ax cables and signal boosters. “If we’ve got to put people on a training course to watch TV, we’ve probably got it wrong” - Richard Lindsay-Davies highlighting the smart TV usability challenge. “We’ve all heard the anecdotes about hearing people cheering goals, but is there any evidence for how much viewers really care about latency?” - my question to Keith Chow from Nokia who demonstrated a very impressive sub-2s latency video distribution system leveraging IP Multicast and Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Yesterday at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in Central London, a group of media professionals gathered for “TV to IP: The Capacity Challenge”, an event organised by SCTE ® (the Society for Broadband Professionals) and sponsored by Broadpeak and Nokia.
Thanks to all the panelists and organisers for a very informative and engaging day!
To read the full discussion please visit Paul’s linkedin page: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/paulmarkham1
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ADVERTORIAL
Experience the Future of Live Streaming
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Broadcast / Streaming Technologies Comparison
Feature
Traditional OTT
DTT Broadcast (National Scale)
DTH Broadcast (Global Scale)
Nokia CDN for Live (Global Coverage)
Latency
20 – >200 s
1 – 2 s 2 - 8 s Native
1 – 2 s 2 - 8 s Native
<2 s
Channel Switch
5 – 15 s
<0.5 s >40%
Packet Loss Tolerance <5%
Scalability
Limited
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Energy Efficiency
High server usage Broadcast optimized Satellite optimized
Router-based delivery efficiency
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