Although home networks could be a significant opportunity for telecom service providers, substantial hurdles must first be addressed, according to Monday’s session on “The Home Network as IPTV Value Add” sponsored by the International Engineering Consortium.

Some are “struggling with just under 10-hour installation times for IPTV services; the more progressive are hitting five to six hours,” said Derek Kuhn, senior director of marketing and business development for Alcatel-Lucent. “Those numbers have to come down.”

Variables impacting installation time include the home’s age and style, how involved homeowners are with the installation process and even household clutter, Kuhn said.

In order to minimize or eliminate the amount of new wiring required in a home, some telcos, including AT&T and Verizon, have turned to home networks based on the multimedia over coax (MOCA) or HomePNA standard, which use existing phone or coaxial cable wiring. But Kuhn cautioned that when it comes to such technologies, “the difference from vendor to vendor in terms of throughput in the home is astonishing.”

Ironically, one IPTV service provider that claims average installation times toward the lower range of Kuhn’s scale is using neither MOCA nor HomePNA. That company—Optical Entertainment Network—installs Category 5 wiring for all video connections, supplemented by wireless for data only. “All television has to be Category 5,” said Allen Easty, chief technology officer for Optical Entertainment Network, which offers IPTV service, including high-definition video-on-demand, under the Fision brand.

Recent research from Ovum presented at the session revealed another dimension to installation challenges. That research, based on interviews with 1000 consumers, showed consumers would prefer to pay for any home network services on a monthly basis. But today’s high installation and maintenance costs mean “lots of months that customers have to stay with you to pay back [those costs],” said Brett Azuma, president of Ovum.