CONTENT

Telecommunications networks that are owned (as opposed to leased) by the companies that sell stuff over them. For example, ILECs are generally facilities-based, but CLECs are not. CLECs essentially rent passage on the ILECs’ networks.

Usage: The ISP described itself as a “facilities-based” provider, because it owned and operated the server array that provided connectivity and firewall protection.

Federal Communications Commission – The agency of the U.S. government that regulates radio, video, telephone and satellite communications systems. Established in tandem with Communications Act of 1934, and based in Washington, D.C., the FCC regulates 1) who can manufacture and sell telecommunications equipment and services, 2) the price of inter-state (but not intra-state) long distance, video and data services, and 3) related standards. The FCC reports directly to Congress, and is composed of five commissioners, hand-appointed by the President. One is designated chairman, and not more than three can share the same party affiliation (Republican, Democrat or other). Cable companies answer to the commission’s Cable Services Bureau; telcos are governed by the Common Carrier Bureau; wireless telecommunications companies report to the Wireless Bureau. TV and radio broadcasters answer to the Mass Media Bureau; the Office of Engineering and Technologies handles technology evaluations and approvals. www.fcc.gov

Usage: The big topic of debate among FCC watchers in 2005 was whether it would tackle a re-write of the ’96 Telecom Act.

A cylindrical metal fitting used to join a coaxial cable to something else: A set-top, cable ready TV set or VCR, or another coaxial wire. (The latter requires the use of a barrel connector – itself another fitting with female inputs on both ends, which accepts male F-connectors on each end.) F-connectors are gendered, male or female, and are screwed or pushed onto the coaxial cable. The male has a protruding center pin; the female has a receptacle to accept a protruding center wire.

Usage: Quality materials and craftsmanship matters in the correct installation of the F-connector, whether in the plant, or in someone’s house – which makes customer-installed F connectors a frequent source of upstream noise problems.

Forward Error Correction — A method to repair digital transmission mistakes by adding descriptive data – extra ones and zeros – into a bit stream before it’s sent, then checking the descriptive bits at the destination to ensure all the bits within the stream are in the right state, and the right order. The nice thing about digital is this: When a bit goes bad, it either turns from a one into a zero, or visa versa. The trick is knowing when that has happened, and to how many bits. Forward error correction techniques can be simple, such as parity checks, which ensure the order and state of arriving bits. More complicated techniques, like trellis coding and Reed Solomon coding, are used in sending digital video.

The interface point linking fiber and coax in hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) systems. Signals riding downstream (headend to home) direction move over fiber until they get to the node, at which point they’re converted from light to radio frequency (RF), amplified, and dispatched onto coaxial cables for the last leg of the ride to homes. In the upstream direction, the opposite is true: Coaxial cables carry signals from homes to the node, where they’re converted into light and sent back to the headend over optical cables. Fiber nodes are generally fed by four to six optical cables, some left “dark,” meaning “reserved for future use.” Coaxial cables usually exit nodes in north-south-east-west directions. For that reason, some HFC designs place the node near logical center of the node serving area. The number of homes served by a fiber node can range from 125 to 5,000 or more – but 500 homes per node is a good rule of thumb in contemporary cable systems.

Usage: When more bandwidth is needed by connected homes, fiber nodes can be “split” – meaning more transmitters and receivers are attached to the dark glass. A serving area is comprised of four or more 500-home fiber nodes.

An umbrella term describing the techniques and equipment used to imprint light with telecommunications or video signals, for the purposes of transporting those signals. The quest to harness light dates back to the late 1880s, when Thomas Edison was working on the incandescent light bulb. An engineer named William Wheeler, from Concord, Mass – perhaps believing Edison’s invention impractical – patented a way to move light through pipes with reflective linings. It didn’t work out so well. Turns out that light doesn’t go very far when captured, unless there’s no way for it to escape.
No escape calls for total internal reflection, discovered in the 1950s by optical brianiacs, who built an optical cable that could pipe light. One snag: Only about 10% of the transmitted light remained – over an optical cable that was but 32 feet long. That disovery begat two separate revelations:

1) Optical fiber needed to be wrapped in a cladding (still in use today), so that light wouldn’t disappear when traveling.
2) Impurity-free glass for the optical cables made light go much farther – upwards of 30 miles, these days, for that same 10 percent of remaining light.

Optical fibers are made of glass, plastic, or plastic-clad glass, and are smaller in diameter than a human hair. They’re flexible and bendable, much like monofilament fishing line. Fibers are packaged together in bundles, encased in a flexible tube. Because they’re so tiny, the process of attaching two fibers – known as splicing – is an intricate and craft-sensitive process that requires specialized equipment. On either end of a fiber bundle is a light source, and a light receiver.

Usage: Fiber optics is the “F” in “HFC.”

A topology that drives optical cables deep into neighborhoods, sometimes to groups of 25 or so homes (“fiber to the curb”), and sometimes all the way to homes (“fiber to the home” or “fiber-to-the-premise”).

While FTTx isn’t new, it is definitely in vogue again, driven by the renewed appetite for video by telephone companies. Three big telephone companies made big “fiber to the” announcements in 2004: SBC Communications and BellSouth said they’ll stop at the curb; Verizon said it’ll go all the way to the side of the house.

Verizon’s plan emerged in July of 2004, when the telco earmarked portions of California, Florida and Texas for a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployment. Since then, the telco announced plans to take its FTTP work everywhere it can.

A few months later, SBC expressed plans to become “the number-two video provider” to 18 million homes in its footprint, within three years. By “curb,” SBC means within 3,000 to 5,000 feet of connected homes, with 20-25 Mbps of downstream/forward bandwidth. They figure it’ll cost between $500-$600 per connected home in the early years, until scale kicks in with a price tag in the $300-$450 range. That includes set-tops, in-home wiring, and truck rolls. Total, SBC is estimating to spend $4 bil. for implementation, and another billion on “success-based” capital (money that is spent only when a revenue stream is created).

Verizon’s work is probably the closest to cable’s HFC, because it reserves a full wavelength (color of light) to carry 860 MHz worth of cable services. That means Verizon’s bill of materials for its big project looks a lot like the lists cable operators made during their last big upgrade push.

Cable, of course, also uses a “fiber-to-the” methodology. They just don’t call it that. They call it “HFC,” for hybrid fiber-coax. By comparison, cable’s HFC networks are roughly equivalent to “fiber to 500 Verizon-premises,” or “fiber-to-20-SBC-curbs.”

FPGA – A type of silicon chip that can be remotely reconfigured, even after it’s embedded into its “host” device. The “programmable” in FPGA means “not fixed,” as is the case with other types of chips, such as ASICs. “Gates” are the building blocks of digital circuits, derived from formal logic words “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT.” An array of gates – as many as 8 million these days, according to FPGA inventors Xilinx Inc.) – is a large-scale collection of logical operations.

Anything designed to remove portions of whatever goes through it. In an applied, broadband sense, filters are usually discussed in terms of spectrum – which signals pass through, versus which signals get trapped. Filters, also called “traps,” used to be installed on any homes that didn’t subscribe to two-way services, so that any noise “before the filter” didn’t travel upstream and cause trouble. The proliferation of two-way services, both on the broadband data and digital video side (VOD, SVOD), prompted a fairly aggressive removal of filters in the late 1990s. Instead, operators did a lot of network clean-up, to make sure noise couldn’t leak upstream.

Firewall – A means of protecting networked computers, and the information they hold, from hackers and information thieves. Firewalls are a sort of holding cell for packets entering a protected (“firewalled”) network. Essentially, the firewall “pats packets down” before they’re permitted entry. Firewalls are data filters that usually work in a client-server configuration, although in some cases both client and server is the same compuer. Firewalls are programmed to let only authorized packets enter or leave the PC (the “client”). Firewalls can be used by consumers to restrict access to adult material, or by a high-speed data provider, to prevent the flow of streamed premium programming to customers who aren’t authorized to receive it.

A connector developed by Apple Inc. and Texas Instruments to move data at lickety-split speeds (400 Mbps) in a daisy-chain arrangement: Your camera hooked to your PC hooked to your HDTV hooked to your anything else with a firewire connector. Also known as IEEE 1394 and “High Performance Serial Bus.” Contextually, firewire tends to pop up in discussions about “plug and play” devices. Because any discussion of bits moving at high speeds over connectors usually implies video, and because unprotected digital video moving at high speeds over connectors makes copyright holders nervous, copy protection methods are usually lurking nearby. Firewire moves in tandem with the copy protection method known as “5C,” named for the five companies who devised it.

Usage: Charter Communications and Samsung Electronics are working on a sort of “smart firewire” arrangement, to make two-way TVs out of one-way TVs.

A catch-all term for point-to-point, over-the-air communications networks between stationary devices. The “fixed” in “fixed wireless” refers to the fact that the receiving antenna is stationary – unlike, say, your cell phone, which has a mobile antenna designed to go where you go. Fixed wireless networks usually come up in conversations about Local Multichannel Distribution Systems (LMDS) and Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Systems (MMDS).

A type of computer memory chip that doesn’t get erased when the device that houses it is powered-down. The memory stick in your digital camera, for instance, holds its pictures with flash memory. If your brain had flash memory, it would hold the things you tend to remember no matter what: Your birthday; the Pledge of Allegiance; multiplication tables; your greatest love; the words to your favorite song. Flash is generally the most expensive of the memory chips. In digital video applications, and specifically in set-top boxes, flash memory holds the software code that makes applications work – the “applications code,” or “executables,” in technical parlance. That means the operating system, electronic program guide, and any other “resident apps” that are omnipresent in the box.

Usage: Advanced digital set-tops generally contain at least 8 MBytes of flash memory.

A video monitor so svelte it can hang on the wall, like a picture in a frame, or press snugly to the back of your desk, instead of taking up a huge glob of surface space. As television and high definition television goes, flat panels come in two main flavors: Plasma, and liquid crystal display (LCD). Plasma TVs work by wedging xenon and neon gas between two plates of glass, then exciting the electrons of the gas enough to produce visible light — in the form of tiny red, green and blue fluorescent lights that combine, just like pixels on traditional TVs, to make TV pictures. Liquid crystals, on the other hand, are compounds that flow like liquids. At a molecular level, liquid crystals have a rod-like structure, which can be manipulated to produce light. In an LCD display, the liquid crystals are sandwiched between two polarized plates, which are manipulated with an electric field.

Usage: A milestone of the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show was a 102-inch flat panel display made by Samsung – just for the sake of being biggest.

A big hassle of an equipment changeout, usually expensive, and involving the physical removal of one piece of usually heavy, awkward gear for another piece of heavy, awkward gear. In cable, the term “forklift upgrade” originated on the data side of the house, when operators were assessing the operational impact of delivering telephone services over the same headend gear that delivers broadband Internet. The concern: That existing Cable Modem Termination Systems were sturdy enough to deliver carrier-class phone, without a “forklift upgrade.”

Synonymous with “downstream channel,” the flow of signals toward homes. The companion and opposing term for “forward channel” is “reverse channel” or “return channel,” which is the signal direction from homes to headends.

An individual slice of a moving picture, whether analog or digital. Analog television, for instance, is created with cameras that record images at a rate of 30 frames per second, while movies are filmed at a rate of 24 frames per second. In digital video, a “frame” is a digitized representation of its analog origins. See “b-frame.”

The number of cycles per second that an analog signal represents. Picture the letter S on its side. Trace your finger from start to end of the S – that’s one cycle. Cycles per second, as a designator for frequency, are described in “Hertz.” One cycle equals one Hertz. A 750 MHz system carries 750 million cycles per second.

The ability to move from one spectral area to another, if the first zone goes kaflooey. Used in cellular phone, upstream cable, and anywhere interference can damage signals riding at a particular frequency.

The segmentation of certain voice, video or data traffic to specific spectral zones. In cable systems, for instance, the upstream (headend to home frequencies are designed to the range between 5-42 MHz; downstream (home to headend) frequencies move between 52-860 MHz or 1 GHz. In many cases, frequency allocations for broadband or communications services are determined by the FCC.

An acronym that began in the military, and remains popular among salty technologists. In its most polite rendering, “fubar” stands for “fouled up beyond all repair.” A cousin of “snafu,” for “situation normal/all fouled up.”