Hoping to ride the booming interest in IPTV, Broadwing today announced a fiber-based real-time media multicast service that enables broadcast and content distribution companies to distribute to multiple locations from its 180-network point of presence.

The media multicast service was developed within Broadwing by Del Bothof, vice president and general manager of Broadwing's media services group and the man who launched the Vyvx video network, later acquired by Wiltel and now part of Level 3 Communications.

The new service builds on dynamic synchronous transfer mode (DTM) technology that offers the bandwidth, the quality of service, the management and monitoring capability and the multicasting to serve today's video transport market, Bothof said.

"Routine monitoring doesn't work for these networks because knowing the bit error rate doesn't tell you if the voice and video are in synch," he said. "From our television operations center, you can look at the video feed and manage the service."

DTM enables Broadwing to offer customers bandwidth in 1 Mb/s intervals up to Gigabit Ethernet. Plus the service is asymmetric, so bandwidth isn't consumed in an upstream channel unless needed.

"This is different from regular multicast, which requires you to multicast from the source to every location, using multiple bandwidth streams," Bothof said. "DTM allows us to drop and continue--we set up a path and drop off the appropriate portions at different headends as needed."

Broadwing has a DTM footprint covering 40 major markets in the U.S.