French telco and IPTV provider Bouygues Telecom has chosen Samsung to deliver its next generation gateway. First sets are to be delivered before the end of the year.
Samsung’s OneBox should be to Bouygues Telecom what Horizon will be to Liberty Global: a high-end set-top box which serves as a gateway and offers multiple functionalities in order to better compete with the advanced set-tops that its competitors Free and SFR are offering to their customers.
Samsung has already secured a contract for the UPC Horizon box and recently joined Cisco in the manufacture of TiVo receivers for Virgin Media.
The box will house the broadband modem and Wi-Fi router as well as television decoder. At the heart of the system sits an Intel Atom EC 4200 chipset and there is 1 Gigabit of RAM available. There will be a 350GB hard disc PVR.
An interesting innovation of the new box is the Wi-Fi routers, developed by Israeli firm Celeno, which will stream TV channels across the subscriber’s home to other TV screens, PCs, mobile phones and tablets. The box will also connect to various web services, but Bouygues has not released any further details of the new box.
There will be two versions of the box, one for Fibre-to-the-Curb homes and one for Fibre-to-the-home subscribers to the service.
