I'll answer the questions about Vision point by point:

Home Hub needed for Vision?

When Vision content is being streamed via a BT Home Hub, a QoS (Quality of Service) session is set up that controls and prioritises the flow of data across the network. Customers on lower speed lines or who utilise their connection heavily while watching Vision content will find the service unusable without this.

For the BT Vision service to function as it was designed this QoS feature of the Home Hub is required. It is true that you don't *need* it, but fundamentally the product is incomplete without it. We could not offer the current BT Vision product without the QoS element being part of the product for this reason.

Network

BT Vision is powered by the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform, which will open up a lot of functionality, especially once the V2 Vision box is launched. The current BT Vision platform design places a huge capacity requirement on the Headend side of the connection (The Headend are the servers that sit on BTs network and control the content and data stream), which will only increase as new features are launched.

To enable the service to work on our network, both our architecture and wholesale product mix would need to be changed pretty significantly so we can gain efficient access to the Vision Headend platform. With the work to move us to 21CN now underway, there would simply be no point in us reconfiguring this now - We would need to do it again almost immediately for the move to the 21CN network. Once we have moved over to 21CN this will be a somewhat different story.

Subscription / Authentication

In order to use Vision, the Vision box has to authenticate and be identified by the IPTV platform as a subscriber of the service. Billing and other customer data would have to be securely transferred between our systems and BTs in real-time. This is certainly technically possible, but it requires quite a bit of development work. Until this is done the BT Vision product won't be able to recognise and provide service to our customers.

Alternatives

As you can gather from the above, providing the current Vision product to our customers isn't just a case of posting out some V-boxes for people to plug in. The BT Vision product as-is was designed to be used only with the BT infrastructure, and the question has to be asked whether it is in fact easier to redesign the product from the ground up so that it can be used on our (and of course other BT partner) networks. We are helping BT with that, and this outcome is probably more likely as a short term solution.

At this moment in time however, no solution is that close, and I would imagine we are talking at least 9 - 12 months before we would be in a position to deliver Vision in any form whatsoever. That is why it's not been included in the plans for this year, although we would dearly love to be in a position to offer it sooner.

I hope that's useful information - I'm just sorry it can't be more positive for the moment. I will try to provide regular updates on progress via the community site forum.

Cheers,

Ian

SNAP! Surely it doesn't need the home hub to launch BT Vision? I have a few friends on BT Internet that are using their own wireless routers rather than the Home Hub and they are using BT Vision without any problems, surely the BT Vision box just connects to any Internet connection?

When you consider that after VAT we pay nearly all of your subscription straight to BT in fixed costs, you can hopefully understand why that is the case. See http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/02/28/how-uk-isps-are-charged-for-broadband-the-cost-of-ipstream/ for some details.

I'm hopeful we will be able to improve Option 1 in some ways later this year, but it just wasn't something the bean counters would let us do at this point in time!

Ian