Institute of Electrical and Electronic Enginers. Self-described as the world’s biggest technical professional society, with 400,000+ members in 10 global regions. Pronounced “eye-triple-E,” The IEEE’s mission is to help “advance global prosperity by promoting the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electrical and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.”

From its own description (www.ietf.org,) the Internet Engineering Task Force, formed in 1986, is “a loosely self-organized group of people who make technical and other contributions to the engineering and evolution of the Internet and its technologies.” It is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet standard specifications. Its mission includes:

• Identifying, and proposing solutions to, pressing operational and technical problems in the Internet;
• Specifying the development or usage of protocols and the near-term architecture to solve such technical problems for the Internet;
• Making recommendations to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) regarding the standardization of protocols and protocol usage in the Internet;
• Facilitating technology transfer from the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) to the wider Internet community; and
• Providing a forum for the exchange of information within the Internet community between vendors, users, researchers, agency contractors and network managers.

The IETF is not a traditional standards organization, although many specifications are produced that become standards. The IETF is made up of volunteers who meet three times a year to fulfill the IETF mission.

Shortcut for “inter-frame,” a component of the MPEG-2 method for compressing digital video pictures. Compression works by removing any duplicated material from one frame of video to the next. The role of the I-frame is to examine the current frame and the succeeding frame, then subtract any parts of the picture that are the same from one to the next.

Usage: Some also call the I-frame an “initialization frame.”

Any of the current or acquired regional Bell operating companies — among them Ameritech, BellSouth, Qwest, SBC Communications, and Verizon — that offer local telephone service.

Usage: Recognizing increased competition for their local loops, ILECs sought regulatory relief to enter long-distance services, too.

An inherent resistance to energy flowing through a transmission medium. Specific to cable, the word “impedance” is generally latched to the word “mismatch.” An impedance mismatch is what happens when two plant elements — like a coaxial cable and an F-connector — are hitched up to one another, but carry different inherent impedance characteristics.

The most common contributor to impedance mismatch is a poor or loose mechanical connection to a cable-connected device in the home.

When impedance mismatch happens, the transfer of energy isn’t optimized, which causes two problems: 1) a loss of transmitted signal strength, and 2) a reflection of the transmitted signal back toward its source. Either way, impedance mismatch results in an impaired TV picture.

Usage: The symptom of an impedance mismatch is a faint ghosted image on the TV screen.

A form of interference common to the cable upstream path, and caused by quick jolts of unwanted electrical energy. The brief blasts disrupt any information traveling on the network. Also known as “spurious noise” and “electrical transient noise,” impulse noise is particularly damaging to cable’s 5-40 MHz upstream signal path.

Impulse noise happens when electric-powered things, from furnaces to hair-dryers, kick on. An electrical spark — just like when you shuffle across the carpet, in winter, wearing socks, then touch something — can temporarily obliterate the entire 5-40 MHz band. (At one trade show in the late ’90s, Terayon Corp. actually brought a hair-dryer as part of its demo, to show how sturdy its upstream modulation was against impulse noise.)

Telco DSL doesnt like impulse noise, either. AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore, in their day, characterized impulse noise as any unwanted electrical surge lasting around 100 microseconds, with peak power of around 10 milivolts. They suggested the use of interleaving and Reed-Solomon error correction to compensate for it. The main contributor to impulse noise on telco plant is ringer noise on adjacent copper pairs that share the same bundle.

Usage: Impulse noise and ingress noise can funnel together with the desired signal, and get amplified along the way from the house to the headend.

A portion of a 6 MHz channel, or a portion of a digital video multiplex used to haul business-critical data (scheduling, encryption or other coordinating data) to a set-top box. In analog television, in-band information gets imprinted on an audio subcarrier, or in the vertical blanking interval (VBI). In digital television, information gets slotted into the MPEG-2 transport stream. The benefit of in-band signaling is that it eliminates the need for a separate data receiver in the set-top. The drawback is that the set-top must be tuned to the channel containing the information, in order for it to be received. Some vendors, therefore, spread the information to be imparted across several channels, in band. Interactive information can ride the in-band path in two ways. If IP-based, it can be encapsulated into an MPEG-2 stream. Or, the interactive element can be captured as a sort of still frame (the MPEG-2 “inter-frame” or “i-frame”) and delivered to the TV.

Usage: “In-band” tends to come up when discussing EBIF [Enhanced Bindary Interchange Format” apps, which travel “in-band” with the television show or advertisement they make interactive.

Devices that aid the retrieval or submission of information to computer or communications devices. Examples include printers, monitors, keyboards, even the television remote.

In short, silicon chips. The integrated circuit replaces having to physically wire together electronic components — like resistors, transistors and diodes — by etching them onto a semi-conductor material, such as silicon.

Usage: Integrated circuit technology is used to produce chips which perform a specific computing purpose.

The process of combining different parts, often software, toward a specific whole. In an applied technology sense, the word “integration” is frequently followed by the word “issues.” Integration issues are consistently the nimblest poltergeists when attempting to launch advanced services into broadband networks.

Integration issues are obstacles, usually in software, and usually related to making different types of software work cooperatively. Like most things related to software, an “integration issue” is rarely something you can pick up with your hands, examine, diagnose, and fix. It’s a cousin to what happens when something in your PC’s firewall obstructs your e-mail, and it takes you half a Saturday to fix it.

An industrial example: The electronic program guide must be a good neighbor to other software sitting inside a set-top box: That means all of the on-demand fare, anything clickable, and anything “underneath,” like middleware, operating systems, and any business-critical, resident applications. No one application can hog available processing power or memory. All have to harmoniously co-exist. One bad neighbor, and the box locks up.

Integration issues are the reason interactive TV remains a challenge. Think back to the mid’90s, when cable first started installing digital set-top boxes. Recall what those boxes did: Squeezed 10x or more channels into the space of one analog channel, and offered an electronic guide to help subscribers navigate. We didn’t hear much about integration issues then, because there wasn’t much software required.

Over the past decade, digital boxes got beefier. Processing power increased, memory footprints increased, hard drives entered the scene.

More muscle under the hood, let alone the inclusion of extra hardware, like a hard drive, means lots more software. There’s the operating system, like Microsoft’s WinCE and PowerTV, needed to tell the chips what to do. There’s middleware on top of that. Ultimately, there’s OCAP middleware, which brings other integration issues. And don’t forget the applications: The guide, the on-demand controls, maybe clickable ads, or clickable content that correlates with the show that’s airing.

Part of “integration issues” are those individual software modules — the OS, the middleware, and the applications. Each has to run perfectly in isolation. Each also has to work perfectly with one another. That’s the technological to-do list comprising integration.

Integration also involves scheduling and organization.Somebody has to track version control, to make sure an update to one application doesn’t bring other to its (virtual) knees.

Because integration is so heavily centered on software, it will likely remain a technical focal point for decades to come.

The techniques, technologies and services that allow TV viewers to reciprocally engage with television or television show, instead of passively watching. Examples range a wide gamut: All flavors of on-demand video; locally stored digital video recorders; “bound” or “program-synchronous” applications, which come along with a TV program or advertisement; and “unbound” applications, evoked with a button on the remote control, like the electronic program guide.

Interactive TV pioneer Gary Lauder was the first to point out that the term interactive TV is ad detriment to the categoryl, because by the time something “interactive” becomes mainstream, it dons the name of what it does or what it is — and not the name “interactive TV.” Pausing a TV show stored on a remote VOD server, for instance, is clearly interactive — the request to pause travels a few miles upstream to a remote server, where the viewer’s session is halted — but nobody calls it “interactive TV.”

A technique common to analog television displays, which describes the way in which frames of video are meshed together to make the picture. Television video pictures are comprised of 30 frames each second; each frame consists of two fields, containing even and odd numbered lines of picture information. When a TV video picture displays on an analog television, the odd numbered lines fill one field, a line at a time; ditto for the even-numbered lines. The two fields of scanned lines are then quickly stitched (interlaced) together, to produce one frame of video. When frames of video move in sequence at a rate of 30 frames per second, TV video is displayed. Television engineers selected interlaced scanning as the underlying display technology of the 110 mil. U.S. analog TV homes because it reduced flicker, while conserving bandwidth: Interlaced scan systems take up 4.2 MHz of baseband bandwidth.

Usage: Televisions use interlaced scans to display video, while personal computers/monitors use progressive scan video.

A technique, usually specific to digital technologies, where bits bearing control, error correction or other guidance information are interspersed with payload bits. At the receive end, when the bits are re-assembled, the info-bearing bits are put into action to do whatever they were intended to do. Forward error correction in digital video transmissions is one of many examples. In one common FEC technique, known as Reed-Solomon encoding, redundant bits are interspersed at a rate of 20 for every 187 data bits. At the receive end, the redundant bits are used in an algorithm to pinpoint and correct for data transmission errors.

The language of the Internet, used by data communications equipment to speak to each other — so that all of the pieces in the chain of Internet-related communications know where and how to send information.

Also an acronym that does not transfer gracefully into spoken language. Example (say this aloud): “It seems like IP everywhere.”

But yet, it does seem like IP everywhere. Internet Protocol is the language of cable modems, DSL modems, and an increasing number of digital set-top boxes (such as those that contain a DOCSIS or other IP-based communications path). Some telephone services travel in IP, which is why it’s called “voice over IP.”

The reason why IP remains a hot topic is its stance as the “next big thing” that will bring incremental revenues. It’s easy to carry on wide pipes; everybody who interacts on the Internet uses it; and there are piles of credible data- and telco-equipment manufacturers building for it.

Plus, software companies are ceaselessly coming out with new IP applications that will mostly run better on broadband IP networks: Video telephony, videoconferencing and second-line or full-home phone service, carried on the TV or the personal computer, are all part of the potential IP-service mix.

Technically, IP is a subset of a longer protocol, known as TCP/IP, or transmission-control protocol/Internet protocol. TCP/IP is a package of different rules that define how data move from one network layer to another. There are five different layers, and they all count toward the end game, which is moving data around so that they’re all in one piece at their target destination.

Just as protocol in the etiquette sense provides guidelines on how to behave in certain situations — to say “please,” and to push in your chair when you leave the table — IP is a set of rules that tells data hardware how to behave. It’s part procedure, part practice and part policy.

Mostly, IP puts addresses on packets of data. In a high-speed-data network, for example, cable modems and DSL users are identified by their IP addresses. IP doesn’t mind the data to make sure that they safely get to another destination. That’s on the chore list of a different, but related, protocol: TCP.

Historically, IP is frequently heralded as the brainchild of the U.S. Department of Defense, which during the Cold War wanted a way to communicate even if major communications hubs were bombed. The idea was to take a message, chop it into smaller pieces (packets), and send the packets over completely different routes to the destination. Thus, each packet needed to be self-sufficient, knowing its source and destination. At the destination, the packets could be reassembled and read.

That design goal necessitated the inclusion of lots of “header information,” to make the packet self-sustaining. A typical IP packet contains 32 bits (4 bytes) of header info, including source and destination, among other things.

Usage: The pervasiveness of the Internet, and its IP baseline, will only continue to entwine itself into voice, video and data techniques for the foreseeable future.

Equipment or software that is innately able to talk to, interconnect, or otherwise harmoniously operate with other equipment or software– even, and especially, if that equipment is made by completely different manufacturers.

Interoperability is a mainstay of most technical specifications. After decades of experience in buying proprietary, vendor-specific equipment, for instance, cable providers wearied of feeling locked-in to specific equipment providers. They consequently insisted, via various technical specifications, on interoperable equipment.

Their reasoning: Interoperability standards would shatter proprietary, vendor-specific strangleholds. Simultaneously, interoperable equipment would yield lower-cost equipment, because more vendors could compete.

Perhaps the best example of a successful interoperability effort is CableLabs’ work in cable modems, via the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS). When proprietary cable modems were introduced by a thin handful of companies, in the 1994 time frame, they were priced at around $500 each. As of March, 2005, dozens of companies and hundreds of modems had become CableLabs-certified. Current cable modem prices are below $40. The program worked so well that in March, 2005, one technologist actually used the word “DOCSIS” as a verb: “What we want to do to the set-top box is to DOCSIS-ize it.”

A soon-to-be-quaint predecessor to on-demand movie and event ordering. Video customers outfitted with an IPPV-capable set-top box click to order an event from the TV screen, rather than having to phone in the request. Quaint because IPPV is rapidly being replaced by VOD (video on demand), which also brings “trick modes,” like fast forward, rewind, and pause. Regardless, IPPV requires two-way plant, and an RF return channel in the set-top box — which means it is generally a cable television thing, not offered by satellite providers.

Usage: The activation of two-way plant in the 1990s enabled IPPV, which made it more convenient for cable customers to order movies.

An amorphous term describing the delivery of digitized video over the passageway used by devices that “speak” in Internet Protocol, such as cable and DSL modems, and anything with an Ethernet connector.

A handy starting point in describing IPTV — because it carries so many nuances — is to describe what it isn’t. There are three big things that IPTV isn’t:

 

1)     IPTV isn’t synonymous with advanced compression codecs, although advanced codecs can be used to carry more stuff in IPTV.

2)     IPTV isn’t synonymous with “all digital,” even though it’s “a digital thing.”

3)     IPTV isn’t necessarily something that’s delivered over the public Internet, even though it contains the term “Internet Protocol.” That’s because IP is a language spoken by equipment that can also populate private data networks. (That matters, because private IP networks generally contain strict mechanisms for quality assurance, so that a piece of video content doesn’t “bog down” on the public Internet.)

At this writing, IPTV, as a category, is latched to the plans of various telephone companies, and primarily AT&T, which is building a video strategies around — you guessed it — IPTV. In fact, in its regulatory stance, AT&T successfully reasoned that IPTV is so vastly different than “traditional” cable TV, it shouldn’t carry the same regulatory rules.

Thus the perception was born that IPTV is vastly different than “traditional” digital video delivery methods — like the “MPEG transport” used in cable and satellite networks, and in Verizon’s FiOS plant.

Whether or not IPTV is “vastly different,” feature-wise, is a matter of considerable debate. Proponents of the “vastly different” side reason that it’s the IP part of IPTV that brings that power. IP is broadband; broadband is flourishing. Already, broadband delivers high-speed Internet and voice; why not video?

That could mean that IP, on its own, is how service convergence begins to show up. Maybe it’s showing someone’s photo or phone number on the TV, when they’re calling in to talk to you at home. Maybe it’s pouring a TV show into a PC, over broadband, then later spilling the show into a handheld video player (think video iPod) for later viewing.

Most people familiar with IPTV agree on two things: One, the term IPTV isn’t something consumers should ever need to know about. Two, IPTV will likely augment, not displace, existing video delivery methods.

Usage: One thing is for sure about IPTV: Different people have different definitions. It’s always wise to ask someone “and how do you do define IPTV?” at the onset of any IPTV conversation.

A transmission configured so that it is equally-timed in both directions (outgoing and incoming), without delays. Some network traffic, like voice, or streaming video, is highly intolerant to transit delays, also known as “latency.” Think of it this way: You wouldn’t want the bits constituting your voice, during a live telephone call, to arrive out of order. (Which would be equivalent to saying, “This ridiculous is!”)

Usage: Saying something needs to be isochronous is saying you’re more interested in it getting to and from its destination without delays, than in dedicating a wide chunk of bandwidth for a sustained period of time.

Any company that makes a business of connecting its customers to the Internet. Examples include America Online, Earthlink, and Road Runner — among many, many others that offer dial-up and broadband access to the Internet. Cable providers offering high-speed Internet access are also ISPs, but sometimes call themselves “BSPs,” for “Broadband Service Providers.”

ISPs offer a range of connection methods to their customers: Dial-up, over the telephone network; broadband, over cable or DSL modems; and wireless, over WiFi or WiMAX networks. Most ISPs offer a subscription-based package of services, including Internet and World Wide Web access, e-mail, security/firewalls, newsgroups, and supplemental local content (restaurant reviews, movie listings, weather).

An international standards-setting body for telecommunications. The section of the ITU that matters most to broadband is ITU-T, where the “-T” stands for “Telecommunication Standardization Sector.” That’s the group overseeing consensus-based technical standards related to broadband telecommunications. In cable, the process of making a standard goes roughly like this: CableLabs defines it based on member MSO input, as a specification. That specification then goes to the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, the industry’s ANSI-accredited standards-setting organization. For global ratification, CableLabs or SCTE submit the work to the ITU-T.

Usage: “The specification has been submitted to the ITU for consideration as a global standard.

A company that runs networks carrying long-distance phone and data traffic. In short, a long distance telephone company. To take the acronym in order, IXCs operate between (“inter”) linkages (“exchanges”) of large geographic areas, as entities that haul (“carriers”) information, like phone calls and data. The largest IXCs were AT&T, MCI and Sprint; several smaller companies also qualify as IXCs.