Sacramento-based SureWest Communications offers consumers a mix of fiber to the home service and ADSL2+. Surewest already offers IPTV service to its fiber customers, who can get symmetrical service at speeds up to 25Mbps for $70 bundled, $84 unbundled. Customers out of range have had to make due with vanilla DSL, though last fall the carrier started offering users bonded ADSL2+ services at speeds up to 10Mbps ($31.99).

Surewest now says they're going to offer IPTV services to those customers before the end of the year. The company says the new IPTV services will reach 25,000 customers; 15,000 customers will see the service by December 2009, and an additional 10,000 will be connected by the second quarter of 2010. According to the company, they've made the jump to MPEG-4 compression and are using the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform.

Surewest remains an interesting mish-mash of DSL and fiber, older and recently acquired networks. In December of 2007, SureWest announced plans to acquire Kansas City-based Everest Broadband for $173 million. Actual integration was largely finished by February of 2008, but Everest customers didn't officially take on the Surewest brand name until July of 2008. Many in Kansas City are still waiting for speed upgrades, and users in Sacramento say it often takes a bit of coaxing (and sometimes yelling) to get the faster speeds installed.

Given the expected constraints that face all efforts of IPTV over copper, we'll be interested to hear customer thoughts on the quality of this service when it drops later this year. We know that Surewest was offering IPTV to some select, short loop length customers already, though only in standard definition.