A new kind of service provider is making its debut at this week’s FTTH Council conference in Las Vegas. Optical Entertainment Network is a retail and wholesale provider of triple play services that is currently operating in Houston but has plans to go national.

The year-old company designed its service package “specifically for fiber to the home,” said its co-founder and CEO Thomas Wendt, and will deliver 1 Gb/s capacity per home, including 440 channels of IP television, voice over IP and high-speed data. It will also offer gaming, home security, application rental, PC backup services and other advanced options.

“Most everyone else is trying to retrofit legacy technologies on FTTH--traditional POTs and cable TV with RF insertion,” he said. “We went out and developed a service specifically designed for FTTH.”

Its video package includes programming in 12 different languages and extensive programming in Spanish, and it features 60 pay-per-view channels in addition to the 400 channels of programming.

“We consider ourselves an entertainment company first,” Wendt explained. “We can carry all these small channels because we have developed a system that gives us an unlimited channel capacity. We have put together this channel lineup ourselves and we have ours done, directly with networks and studios. And every single one of them has language for IP distribution and transport, which is an industry first.”

Initially, OEN is working with Phonoscope, a public utility company with an existing 7500-mile fiber optic network throughout Houston and surrounding counties. OEN will begin connecting homes in the Cypress Fairbanks area within the next two weeks. If that first deployment goes well, it will start deploying in the city in January and continue adding fiber drops throughout the city and seven surrounding counties over the next five to six years, Wendt said.

During that time, OEN will also offer its service package to other service providers, including municipalities and power companies, that want to operate an FTTH network. “We will do this retail or wholesale,” he explained. “We can give you a discounted wholesale package or come in an run it for you, on a retail basis.”

Its retail model is also unique--OEN will offer a sub-$50 triple-play service to consumers who are willing to listen to targeted advertising. Non-ad supported service will cost more, Wendt said, but will be competitive.

The company is using Alloptic as its FTTH vendor and working with Extreme Networks for Ethernet in the core and NetCentric as a softswitch vendor. UK-based Nexans is providing pre-connectorized drops and custom enclosures for the outside plant.

OEN has deliberately kept a low profile while it assembled content and technology, said Wendt, who was formerly CTO of Intertainer, the Web-based on-demand movie service. That ends this week. Some content providers, including Showtime, are on hand in Las Vegas to kick off the company’s public debut.

“We have a long history of working with the networks,” Wendt said. “I defy anyone to get IP language [in the contract] from major players and we’ve done that. We have letters from many of them, including A&E saying that we are first.”

To satisfy content providers’ need for security, OEN is using a smart-card based system with rotating keys that changes the security system several times a minute and to provide the quality they want, OEN will not use compression or encoding on its fiber network, he added.