BT Openreach Confirm Commercial Launch for Fibre Based GEA Multicast

BTOpenreach has announced that its GEA Multicast product, which is a point-to-multipoint network layer service that enables operators to deliver IP data streams (e.g. IPTV traffic) more efficiently to their customers, will finally become a full commercial product on 25th November 2013.

Multicast solutions never really found much interest on the old ADSL / ADSL2+ broadband platforms but IPTV (Television) services, fuelled by interest in YouView and rival platforms, have grown and as a result Openreach have slowly developed a GEA Multicast solution that can harness the speed of BT’s superfast broadband (FTTC and FTTP) products for solutions like broadcast TV.

Openreach Statement

“This means that our customers will now be able to send more traffic across the network to benefit from Multicast for GEA’s prioritisation and replication capabilities. This change is ideal for our customers looking to transport linear IPTV across the GEA network, who are increasing their channel mix or looking at higher bandwidth technology including HD, 3D and UHDTV.

The product’s pricing will not change as a result of this announcement with the connection fee and modification fee unchanged and the rental fee structure remaining at £10 per 5Mbps per L2S per annum.”

The new product, which has also been given a total VLAN capacity boost from 500Mbps to 860Mbps (Megabits per second), should complement BTWholesale’s TV Connect product for ISPs; this effectively delivers nationwide broadcast TV services (except in the 8-10% of rural areas that are still stuck on BT’s older 20CN/ADSL MAX network).