| SCTE Emerging Tech 2009 Review |
<Translation Please 2.0>
This year's Emerging Technologies conference skinnied down just like the magazine you're holding [editorial note: the print edition of Multichannel News went a smaller-size, non-tab format in the April 13 edition], but the collapse to a one-day format did little to upset a chewy amount of detail about what's what in cable tech.
In years past, the annual "ET," put on by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, hit a week or so after the early January Consumer Electronics Show. This year, it ganged in with the Cable Show. Both events produce a well-packaged grouping of technical papers, which this column happily reviews.
Alas. Both batches of papers hit at the same time this year. And because my CD-ROM from the NCTA is scratched or otherwise malfunctioning, their batch will have to wait.
Four papers topped my must-read list from this year's ET, starting with "Analysis of the Impact of Recent Increases of Streaming Traffic," delivered by Carol Ansley, director of intellectual property engineering for Arris -- one of four female presenters (of 28) this year. If you've ever wondered how progressive streaming works, or the technical characteristics of data traffic, you'll find answers with Carol.
Tough call between the upstream papers. The upstream path got its own hour-and-a-half chunk this year, with five presenters. If you're interested in what gunks up the upstream path, and what new or tweaked tools exist to fix it, try "Leveraging S-CDMA for Cost Efficient Upstream Capacity," by Motorola fellow John Ulm.
If you're curious about channel widths for upstream channel bonding, try "DOCSIS 3.0 Upstream Channel Bonding," by Arris chief strategy officer Tom Cloonan.
As for Tony Werner's "The Path to the IP Future" panel -- it was so aces, I'm counting its four papers as one. But ask yourself: Where do Time Warner Cable and the switch-centric crowd stand on the subject?
This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.
