SureWest Communications this week is announcing it will become the first company in the U.S to offer high-definition TV over an IP-based fiber-to-the-premises network.

The Roseville, Calif.-based company currently passes more than 80,000 homes with its FTTP network and will begin commercial service in November. Beginning this week, though, the company will roll out a beta test with customers.

Because there is such a demand for HD, SureWest initially is deploying the service using BigBand Networks' encoders running MPEG2 compression. Compression, though, in this case is more of a misnomer. Unlike other HD deployments where the video signal is squeezed down to 10 Mb/s or so, SureWest is budgeting 19.3 Mb/s for HD video to users' homes.

“We're doing a small amount of compression, making it a constant bit rate and then IP encapsulating it,” said Bill DeMuth, vice president and chief technology officer of SureWest. “That kind of data rate with no errors and buffer overflowing has been the challenge. But it looks really sharp.”

Having fiber directly into every home is the only way it could be accomplished, too. In the headend, the company also is using Cisco Systems' Catalyst 4510 and Catalyst 6509 switches, which give the carriers a total bandwidth of 100 Mb/s bi-directional to each customer. The company has plans to use MPEG4, which will allow it to run HD over copper next year but the demand for HD is too high to delay, DeMuth said.

John Reister, who was recently appointed chief architect for IPTV at BigBand, said HD is becoming an absolute requirement for telco TV providers.

“Their intent is not to be the low-cost provider,” he said. “They want to show premium content and a premium service. And to appeal to the videophile, they're going to need to have HD.”