Or, what if you could watch your cable TV channels from any screen, anywhere – TV, desktop PC, laptop or cell phone – without having to buy and install a special device to shuttle the data around? Or download a movie to your home computer and then watch that movie on any screen, anywhere? Suddenly, the “quadruple play” of voice/video/data/wireless would mean a lot more than just the convenience of paying for four services on a single bill.

Bandwidth Increases Are on the Way

These scenarios may be only two to three years away for U.S. customers. Many wireless carriers are already preparing to implement the next generation of high-speed data services. HSPA (high-speed packet access) with up to 14.4 Mbps will be available on some mobile phones by the end of the year. Sprint expects to begin its mobile WiMAX rollout by year-end, too. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) initiative envisions data speeds as high as 200 or 300 Mbps for mobile wireless devices in the not-too-distant future; communications vendor Ericsson has already demonstrated speeds of 144 Mbps.

At the same time, wireline speeds are also increasing. Verizon and a host of smaller carriers are rolling out fiber-to-the-home networks, AT&T is ramping up its U-Verse service delivered over fiber-to-the-node, and cable companies are getting ready to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0.

The increasing capacity of both wired and wireless broadband means that consumers and businesses will soon have access from anywhere to high-definition video – not just for linear TV but for video on demand, videoconferencing and other new video services.

The Goal: Seamless Mobility for Video Services

Redback Networks, a network equipment company that was bought by Ericsson earlier this year, has been tracking this bandwidth growth and trying to anticipate how carriers and their customers will want to use the new network capacity. Since the company makes edge routers for many of the major communications carriers worldwide (an edge router aggregates and controls traffic at the edge of the access network), it has a lot riding on its guesses about the broadband future.

Redback’s conclusion: Customers have grown used to making phone calls from anywhere, to anywhere. They are used to making calls while in transit, and they're used to having their calls continue uninterrupted as they pass through different providers’ service territories. Once these customers have mobile video services, they will want those services to work the same way. They will expect digital roaming for video just as they do for voice – and, by the way, they’ll expect “five nines” (99.999 percent) reliability for video, too. Customers will want to be permanently and seamlessly connected.

Some more of Redback’s conclusions: Everyone is moving toward all-IP services – even mobile phone providers. But many different access methods (HSPA, CDMA, WiMAX, GPON, GePON, xDSL, etc.) will continue to coexist, and wireless devices will increasingly be built to use multiple access methods.

Two Billion Broadband Video Customers

Redback’s new edge router, the SmartEdge 1200, which was announced today, incorporates all of these ideas and will support "megabit mobility" whenever carriers are ready to offer it. In addition to doubling carrier capacity for new video upgrades, the router extends triple-play services to mobile networks. Because Redback believes that multiple broadband access methods will continue to exist, the router is access-neutral. It will be able to maintain user sessions across different devices, different locations, different access networks, and even different carriers.

The potential market for the router is very large – maybe ten times the size of the market defined by today’s broadband video. Arpit Joshipura, vice president of product management for Redback, says, “Over time, we believe more than 2 billion wireless and wireline users will be upgraded to videocentric broadband networks, from 250 million broadband users today.”

If Redback's guess is right, it could be helping to launch a major shift in the way consumers and businesses use video.