The war of the wires

摘要

"We're not a telephone company anymore; I sort of resent that," says Lea Ann Champion, an executive at SBC, America's second-largest "Baby Bell". "We're a communications and entertainment company." Well, maybe. Ms Champion is in charge of "lightspeed", an SBC project to deliver TV, movies and other entertainment to customers via hugely enhanced broadband connections using internet protocol—a service known in short as IPTV. Lightspced, which will cost $4 billion, has hit technological and legal snags recently that could slow its roll-out, scheduled to begin at the end of this year. But sooner or later IPTV will happen, if only because telecoms companies all over the world are betting on it. And when it does it will be controversial. That is because IPTV forms part of a larger, and quite desperate, defensive strategy now being adopted by telecoms firms against fierce attacks on multiple fronts. On one front are cable giants, such as America's Comcast, which are luring customers with an enticing "triple-play bundle" of TV, broadband and telephony services. On a second front are mobile-phone operators, which young customers in particular are increasingly using to "cut the cord" from their fixed-line company.