Like any nascent technology, this, too, will falter at the beginning before glitches are smoothed.

For all the bluster, smoke and mirrors you will likely see on the floor this week at NXTcomm, it’s important to recognize that as an industry, IPTV is merely a baby. Not in the cute, cuddly sense. And not in the drooling, helpless and messy diaper sense that the naysayers would have you believe.

IPTV is more like the baby-faced kid with athletically gifted parents. He or she has all the right genetic material to be an athletic superstar. Fast, graceful, strong and flexible. If only the kid could just get all of his or her various parts moving in one direction.

Getting an IPTV system up and running is easy. Or at least that’s what the people that have done it tell me. Keeping it running after consumers get their hands on it is the tough part. To do it right, all the parts have to be coordinated. Therein lies the problem.

IPTV systems also are enormously complex and become more complex as applications are added. Take a highly simplistic view. IPTV often involves relatively new compression (MPEG-4) technology, running across grooming technology that is spitting out IP bits (not traditional radio frequency) and traversing a network designed to carry voice and data (don’t you dare drop that packet).

Getting all the pieces functioning with each other will take time, and no one should be shocked that the process has hit some glitches along with way. Name any significant technological shift in the last two decades of the telecom industry, and you’ll find periods of doubt. For example, at this point in ADSL’s life cycle, the industry was still arguing over the best line coding technique.

Vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Fujitsu and Siemens are doing their part by cobbling together ecosystems of network elements that will play nice together and act as primary referee and check collector for Tier 1 telcos. However, signing a marketing alliance, acquiring the right piece to fill in a blank on the PowerPoint or having interoperability lab demos is just the start.

Unlike the traditional cable environment, where say a new user interface can be introduced without a direct impact on several other network elements, IPTV systems must act like a cohesive group to be effective. Software upgrades and version changes to any part of the system can’t happen in a vacuum.

The problem now, however, is that the coordination has to be done in double time. Cable operators have finally hit their stride in the consumer voice world—hey, that took the better part of a decade, too—and telcos can no longer take for granted their position as the dominant provider. Add in the fact that every industry/general media outlet, blogger and analyst type is watching every move made by companies such as AT&T, and you have the equivalent of a spotlight on a sector still learning to run fast while chewing gum.

IPTV holds enormous promise for telcos to not only stop the flow of access lines to competitors, but also to act as the lynch pin that ties together voice, data, video and mobile services into a complete digital lifestyle package. To be sure, there will be delays and ugly episodes in the days ahead. However, it behooves telcos to take a deep breath, realize that cable operators have a jump-start … and then run like hell.