CLEC Cavalier Telephone has traditionally ranked rather poorly in our customer reviews, but the company claims to be the first telephone provider in the states to be offering MPEG-4 based IPTV. Cavalier's new "Triple Play" will offer local and long distance telephone service, 9Mbps DSL, and over 150 digital channels for $95 per month. The service went live today in the Richmond, Virginia area. Other markets expected to launch in the "coming months" are Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Metro Washington, DC.

The catch is that the service is only available to customers within range of the CLEC's 9Mbps ADSL2+ service, according to a recent report in XChange Magazine. This initial launch area consists of about 150,000 homes - Cavalier passes around 300,000 homes in Richmond.

“We’re calibrating the video streams at approximately 2mbps, which allows us to offer multiple streams of video and to provide a good broadband service as well,” Evans notes. By operating the ADSL2+ ports from DSLAMs supplied by the Paradyne unit of Zhone Technologies Inc. at “full throttle,” Cavalier ensures that whatever bandwidth isn’t being used for TV channels at any given time automatically defaults to the Internet access service."

Obviously this means high-definition is out of the picture. Cavalier should have a brief window as the only TelcoTV provider before FiosTV emerges in Richmond. More detail at the Cavalier website.