Cisco patents the triple play

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/18/2006 - 08:07

If you needed proof that the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) has problems, look no further. The USPTO just granted Cisco a patent on the triple play, which means delivering voice, video, and data to the home. Cisco does not have much a presence in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) market because their gear is designed for corporate and institutional networks, and is not really the first or even second choice for community broadband systems.

Like a lot of companies, Cisco has apparently decided if they can't innovate, they can at least sue. The notion of "triple play" is so common that it is laughable to think it could be patented, but we're talking the Federal government here, in a perfect illustration of why you really don't want Federal bureaucrats helping too much with local broadband. You would likely end up with some Federal agency defining broadband as 256 kilobits, or about one one-thousandth of what other countries view as acceptable. Oh, wait, that is what we have--it is the FCC's definition of broadband.

Anyway, I digress. This patent is likely to be challenged early and often. There are numerous other companies that have been working in this field, and Cisco's only (weak) claim to the patent is that they filed it in 2000, before there were too many products on the market that actually implemented this.

Communities need to deal with broadband locally. The Federal government simply does not have the cash to rebuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure of the United States over the next ten years, so waiting for the Feds is an exercise in futility. But there is some good news: there is plenty of money to rebuild local telecom infrastructure. You just have to know where it is. And no, it is not at the state or Federal level.