IPTV Bundle Buyer Beware

Robin Good has a long post about how Americans are easily flummoxed by marketing into locking themselves into a telco IPTV solution at the expense of their Internet connectivity:

A telecom company, who is also a large Internet provider, needs only a little marketing campaign to convince its users and potential clients that with about $50 a month they can get the most unique offer to come around in recent times: super-high-speed Internet access, (the customer representative who called me to explain this offer and clarify any doubts said specifically 20 Mbps), home television channels with free and pay-per-view content including movies and live sports, and even a video-phone!

What they don't tell you is that the moment you accept to do that, this is what will really happen:

IPTV And Home Television Offerings Are Telcos Best Stealth Solution To Bypass Any Net Neutrality Resistance: Wake Up Robin Good, 29 January 2007

Since Americans don't know that real fast Internet means 50Mbps or 100Mbps in countries such as Japan or Korea that actually have it, they sell out for still slow 20Mbps.

Robin Good enumerates some gotchas in that "super-high-speed Internet access" offer.

Among the gotchas are a different version of aDSL that doesn't interoperate with anybody else's, so you can't readily switch to any other DSL provider (even if there is one where you are). Most of the new bandwidth is reserved for IPTV, resulting in slow Internet access, there's no easy way to verify what you're getting, no Mac or Linux support, but there are frequent aDSL modem resets. Plus all this without a contract, which means no obvious recourse. Oh, and all the IPTV content you get uses a proprietary DRM, so you can't copy it or redistribute it.

This is from Robin's experience with one provider, but it sounds worth checking before signing up with any telco that offers a bundle like this.

-jsq