A review of BT's interactive TV trials

This paper reviews the technology of BT's interactive TV trials to date, and looks at some of the technology involved as well as the service provided. The service offered was fully on-demand one-to-one viewing of old TV programmes and a few films; the objective of the trial included testing out the end-to-end system technology within an operational (nonlaboratory) environment. The technology trial looked at three access network technologies, and users' installations were spread between the three, with a common set-top box: ADSL over the existing telephony copper pair; passive optical network (PON) over fibre-to-the-home; and fibre-to-the-kerb plus radio final drop.