ATLANTA -- Rochester Telephone, an Indiana-based communications provider, has selected TANDBERG Television (TAT.OL) as its video head-end provider for a new IPTV service over Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) that will serve its Indiana ILEC footprint. By leveraging TANDBERG Television products, Rochester Telephone is now able to deliver triple play services and high definition programming to subscribers.

The Rochester Telephone agreement marks the 9th TANDBERG Television IPTV deployment in the state of Indiana. The TANDBERG Mediaplex-20™ system is the super video head-end platform for the Indiana Video Network (IVN), a consortium of eight independent rural telephone service providers that provide video services. The TANDBERG iPlex™ platform is the edge video head-end for local program encoding and channel addition for some IVN members.

“Rochester Telephone has built a state-of-the art video head-end, which gives the company complete flexibility and control to offer high definition television (HDTV), personal video recorder (PVR) service and an extensive channel line-up that provides tremendous choice for subscribers,” said Jim Olson, executive vice president of corporate development, TANDBERG Television, Inc. “We’re very proud to support independent telephone companies like Rochester Telephone, who are leading the IPTV revolution in the US.”

“We’ve been providing telephone service for 110 years to this region and have very loyal customers who are thrilled to get their video programming from us,” said Ron Riggle, vice president of operations, Rochester Telephone. “We want to offer them a state-of-the-art triple play service, including voice, long-distance, 150 channels of standard definition national and local programming, 8 channels of HDTV premium and local programming, PVR and Caller ID on the television. With affordable, high-quality video compression from TANDBERG Television, we will truly leverage the power of our new FTTP network to offer an exciting IPTV service with excellent customer care that meets or exceeds the experience that cable can offer.”

Rochester Telephone has built an MPEG-2 video architecture with two Mediaplex-20 video head-ends because of the high-bandwidth capabilities of its fiber network. “We chose the Mediaplex headend, after receiving several bids, because of its high-density, modular design, high quality of the HD and the experienced team approach between all of the suppliers to make interoperability work and give us all the services we wanted at an affordable price,” Mr. Riggle continued.

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