Quadruple Play: QUAD’s Integrated Solution Helps Service Providers Enter New Markets

By Mae Kowalke

TMCnet Associate Editor

 

TMCnet recently had a chance to speak with Phil Thomas, CTO at QUAD, about the “triple play” and “quadruple play” trend, the challenges that service providers face when entering new markets, and how his company’s converged delivery platform can help.

 

QUAD, Thomas said, was founded as Quad Research in 1997, and originally was a provider of streaming video and other services. In 1999, the company decided to focus its efforts on marketing the QUAD delivery platform to service providers.

 

The burst of the dotcom bubble slowed things down somewhat, but things have picked back up and the company is now aggressively marketing its product—a scalable platform used to manage different kinds of digital services—mostly to large service providers such as SBC and Time Warner.

 

Thomas said that QUAD’s platform addresses three main barriers to entry into new markets that carriers face:

 

1. Capital expenses (capex) associated with getting a new service up and running.

 

2. Operating expenses (opex) associated with maintaining the infrastructure needed to provide a particular service.

 

3. Time to delivery, or how long it takes for the new service to become operational.

 

As an example, Thomas said that on average service providers spend about $200 per stream when provisioning state-of-the-art video services. QUAD's platform can cut that cost roughly in half.

 

Setting up a typical multi-play system can take many months, Thomas told TMCnet. That includes time spent on selecting equipment, assembling it, and writing management software.

 

By contrast, “with the QUAD system you should be able to bring up a solution within a week or so,” he said.

 

Thomas stressed that, while QUAD's platform works in a wired or wireless switching environment, it isn't a wireless switch.

 

“We host and deliver content; we're the device that delivers content and creates channels of information,” he said of QUAD.

 

Thomas said that in the industry, a lot of development has been put into convergence at the individual user level, and at the home level. But, to his knowledge, until now “no-one has built a converged system for the service provider.” QUAD addresses convergence at the network/hub level.

 

QUAD’s platform is a box into which various communications devices—including computers, storage drives, fiber channels, and high-speed optical trunks—can be plugged, allowing data to be shared easily between systems.

 

“It's also migration platform to move the carrier toward IMS,” Thomas told TMCnet.

 

The power of QUAD's platform is that, unlike many products available, it is good at delivering both narrow (e.g. wireless) and broad (e.g. wired) streams of content.

 

QUAD has done a lot of testing and benchmarking to understand how its product lowers the cost of supporting various widths of information streams, and plans are in the works to increase bandwidth capabilities 80 to 1 over the platform’s current limits.

 

Of course, with the growth in the triple/quad play market, QUAD is starting to see copycat products emerge. But, Thomas said, no-one has yet to come out with a comparable integrated platform.

 

“There may some out there, but we haven't found them,” Thomas said.

 

He acknowledged that this won't last, which is why QUAD is working hard now to establish itself as a leader, especially in the video market.

 

“It turns out now that video is a big deal,” Thomas noted.