Triple play (telecommunications)
No interruption or authorization for the shift is required—soft handoff takes place automatically as many times as the caller enters or leaves the range.
By about 2000, cable TV companies were in a technical position to offer triple play over one physical medium to a large number of their customers, as their networks already had sufficient bandwidth to carry hundreds of video channels.
Cable's main competition for television in North America came from satellites, which could not compete for voice and interactive broadband due to the latency imposed by physical laws on a geosynchronous satellite—sometimes up to one full second of delay between speaking and being heard.
[3] Cable's main competition for voice and Internet access came from telcos, which were not yet able to compete for television in most markets because DSL over most local loops could not provide enough bandwidth.
Outside the United States, notably in Ecuador, Pakistan,[citation needed] India, Japan, and China, power companies have generally been more successful in leapfrogging legacy technologies.
In the other direction, also in March 2007, the FCC limited the powers of municipalities and states over telcos that want to compete with cable TV companies.
[7] Consumer groups expressed displeasure with this FCC ruling because they fear telcos will only offer service to the richest neighborhoods, which is a major point of contention between telcos wanting to offer television service and local governments is that local governments typically impose "build-out" and community access requirements so a cable provider is forced to wire the entire town within a specified period of time.
In October 2007, the Hartford Courant reported that Connecticut regulators have ordered AT&T to stop signing up new customers for its IPTV service until they got a cable license; AT&T said they would fight this decision in court.
This configuration uses fiber communications to reach distant locations and uses DSL over an existing POTS twisted pair cable as last mile access to the subscriber's home.
Advances in both CDMA and GSM standards, utilizing 3G, 4G, or UMTS allows the service operators to enter into quadruple play and gain competitive advantage against other providers.
The challenges in offering triple play are mostly associated with determining the right business model, backend processes, customer care support, and economic environment, rather than technology.
