Jiangsu Telecom: Exploiting Advantageous Resources to Retain Users

Jiangsu Telecom started developing its IPTV business in 2005, with the view of exploiting its advantageous resources to retain old users and attract new ones. In March 2010, its IPTV system reached a capacity of 2.52 million users (including 1.27 million online activated users). IPTV has played a key role in driving Jiangsu Telecom towards full-service operation.

Strengthening User Loyalty

With the development of the Internet economy, users have become more discerning in their choice of services. They are spread throughout different areas and time zones; they demand different service types and use different service providers. This has brought about challenges for operators to enhance customer loyalty and cut down the churn rate.

To meet the varying demands of users, Jiangsu Telecom launched the mobile version of its “My e-Home”—a customized family-oriented product consisting of three different service packages, e6, e8 and e9. “My e-Home” provides information applications related to telephone, broadband, video entertainment, family financial management, and home office. In Jiangsu Province, over 15% of “My e-Home” users are iTV users and over 45% of iTV users choose e9 package. iTV has become a dominant service in the packages rolled out by Jiangsu Telecom. 

 The company’s IPTV business grew quickly after close cooperation with ZTE. In 2005, ZTE established a relationship with Jiangsu Telecom to jointly develop IPTV services in the province. In 2006 and 2007, ZTE insisted upon making large investments into IPTV despite many vendors cutting or even ceasing their IPTV investment (due to the sluggishness of the Chinese IPTV market). ZTE then launched the industry’s first new-generation media server in 2008, which helped Jiangsu Telecom rapidly deploy its IPTV services. With strong support from ZTE, Jiangsu expanded its IPTV subscriber base from less than 10,000 in May 2008, to more than 1.27 million in March 2010.

Building an Advanced Large-Scale IPTV Network

The IPTV business at Jiangsu Telecom has generally run smoothly. Within a three-year period, its IPTV platform was expanded to accommodate over one million subscribers. But large-scale IPTV operation has also meant challenges for Jiangsu Telecom. Ensuring subscribers receive Quality of Service (QoS) as well as Quality of Experience (QoE) has become their major concern.

As the sole cooperative partner of Jiangsu Telecom’s IPTV business, ZTE has taken these challenges into full consideration.

Live and on-demand broadcasts are two basic IPTV services that have appealed greatly to users. ZTE introduces an innovative Dedicated Live Broadcast Network (DLBN) technology that can separate live broadcast capability from on-demand broadcast capability. According to specific features of the two services, ZTE adopts different techniques to ensure their QoS. For example, the Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique is used for live broadcast, while the retransmission technique of lost UDP packets is used for on-demand broadcast. ZTE is the only vendor that supports these two techniques in both technical and commercial aspects. The separation of live broadcast and on-demand broadcast minimizes mutual influence of the two services, effectively ensuring their QoS.

Moreover, ZTE uses a double-center solution to increase reliability of the IPTV platform. A content scheduling and sharing mechanism enhances the ability to provide high-quality, large-capacity content, while an active network management and detection mechanism casts off restraints in passive network management and greatly shortens the time needed to locate faults. The application of a Ukey-based solution facilitates account creation for a large number of IPTV users every day. In order to enhance service experience, ZTE continues to roll out innovative techniques such as Blink 500ms Channel Switching, CoolShare EPG, EPG-P2P Synchronization, and Smart Cache.

Delivering Diverse IPTV Services Over an Open Platform

In addition to basic IPTV services like live, on-demand, and time shift broadcasts, Jiangsu Telecom has also launched value-added services such as online advertising, vision365, online sports lottery, and converged multimedia services. It has successfully expanded its IPTV business to individuals, homes, and small and medium enterprise users.

To help Jiangsu Telecom deploy diverse IPTV services, ZTE attaches great importance to the openness of its IPTV platform and terminals. On the terminal side, ZTE’s IPTV Set-Top Box (STB) features good compatibility with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and various open interfaces that allow users to access numerous value-added services. At present, Jiangsu Telecom is rolling out feature-rich services to users over ZTE’s STB. These include online games, online security trading, and online payments. All these have greatly enriched user experiences. On the service capability side, ZTE’s IPTV platform enables many content and service providers to create numerous new services through abstraction and convergence of service capabilities. This effectively guarantees that services provided are diverse.

Milestones

■    December 2005: Jiangsu Telecom finished its Phase I IPTV project capable of handling 100,000 users (including 50,000 concurrent users).

■    2006-2007: Jiangsu Telecom built its Phase II IPTV project, with an additional 21,000 concurrent users, and created the Global Eye platform over the original IPTV platform.

■    July 2008: Jiangsu Telecom expanded the capacity of its IPTV platform to accommodate 106,000 users during the Beijing Olympic Games.

■    June 2009: Jiangsu Telecom expanded the capacity of its IPTV platform to accommodate 100,000 concurrent unicast users.

■    October 2009: Jiangsu Telecom chose ZTE as its exclusive supplier for its IPTV platform in Suzhou (a planned expansion in capacity to 100,000 concurrent unicast users  by the end of 2009).

■    December 2009: Jiangsu Telecom planned to expand the capacity of its IPTV network to accommodate 1.04 million users in 2010 and chose ZTE as its exclusive supplier.

■    March 2010: Jiangsu Telecom had an activated IPTV user base of over 1.27 million.