Triple Play services - a combination of Internet access, telephony, TV and video - are expected to offer considerable sales potential in the consumer segment. Triple Play has plenty of appeal for customers: they only need to pay for one access service and can place phone calls affordably over the Internet, surf the Web, watch TV, and access videos, games and music for their home entertainment platforms over the network. These services can be offered on both DSL lines and back channel-enabled broadband TV cable, so competition for consumer business will get tougher. DSL providers and TV cable network operators are suddenly finding that they are rivals in the same market.

There are, however, opportunities amid the competitive risks: Triple Play is seen as a means of increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU), attracting new customers, and offsetting shrinking margins in former cash-cow segments, like call charges and DSL access, with revenue streams from value-added services. So it's hardly surprising that Internet service providers (ISPs) are working hard to begin offering attractive Triple Play services and to enrich these services with value-added communication capabilities and entertainment content.

But to deliver these services, ISPs need more than just a simple infrastructure for data transportation. They need modern networks that are optimized for real-time applications, that can sustain the transmission of TV broadcasts and video on demand and enable guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). This is good for carriers because, with the decline in prices in recent years, they can hardly turn a profit worth mentioning by simply providing data transport infrastructure.