all-IP

2014 Year In Review

After thumbing through every 2014 issue of this magazine, five tech trends rose to the top:

 

1. We’re now squarely in the middle of the transition to “all-IP” (Internet Protocol), as the umbrella covering cloud-delivered services, bandwidth (wired and wireless), connected devices, TV everywhere, and all else in the technological vogue. It began with the cable modem, in the late ‘90s. Nobody really knows when the “all” part of “all-IP” will happen — but “not in my lifetime” is a seldom-heard response.

 

2. This year, the term “OTT” — Over-the-Top — became less a categorical description of Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the new ilk of video competition, and more a common technological ingredient, used by all. In short, with every step toward cloud, operators are “over-the-topping themselves.”

 

3. The recognition that “the competition” now extends beyond satellite and telco-delivered services, to the OTT camp, brought with it a new “tech culture” reality. Vendors, operators and programmers alike spent a sizeable chunk of 2014 retooling to work at “web speed,” which means adopting agile software and “DevOps” strategies.

 

4. RDK, the Reference Design Kit, rose in strategic importance this year, again, and big time. Evidence: In October, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries off-handedly called RDK “a DOCSIS moment,” referencing the cable modem specification that changed the economics of what became the broadband industry.

 

5. “Speed vs. capacity” will sustain as one of the more important tech subtleties. It’s the “gig” that can gum things up: GigaHertz is a unit of capacity, Gigabyte a unit of storage, and Gigabit a measure of speed. But! As important is throughput, or, the amount of stuff we’re moving to and from our various screens. Knowing the distinctions matters.

 

That’s the short list! Merry merry, and may your 2015 technologies be kind and useful.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

 

If All-IP Is Where We’re Going, Where Are We Right Now?

Over the course of the summer, while co-teaching a class about how cable technology works, one question came up, every time: “If all-IP (Internet Protocol) is where we’re going, where are we right now?”

As television milestones go, all-IP is arguably as significant as the shift to color from black-and-white TVs, in the early ‘50s, and when satellite transmissions began, in 1975, and when analog ceded to digital, in the mid-‘90s.

Each phase sparked major growth. Color TVs bumped sales of TVs in general. Satellite distribution opened the door to national scale, which begat the hundreds of TV channels available to us now. Digital made room for high-definition, then broadband services. Broadband is innately IP, so making room for more of it is what this transition is all about.

Which brings us back to the question. If all-IP is where we’re going, where are we now? If you asked an engineering colleague this question, you’d likely get one of two answers: “QAM,” or “MPEG transport.”

The first (QAM) is technically wrong, as direct comparisons go, but nonetheless right because we’ve all used it for so long. It just stuck.

The other (MPEG transport) is confusing because it’s also the term people use to describe digital video compression.

Let’s look at the “P” part of “IP.” Protocol. Protocols are sets of rules that define how data is transmitted and received, so that two or more machines can talk to each other.

What size are the packets? How are errors handled – with forward error correction (FEC), or by re-sending? What’s the data to do when a piece of the transmission path goes kaflooey?

In that case, then, the correct answer for where we’re coming from, as we head to all IP, is “MPEG transport.” MPEG stands for Moving Pictures Experts Group, and is the standards body that gave us MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 compression.

Part of the MPEG compression standard defines transit. Hence “MPEG transport.” It’s the protocol underlying every fielded digital set-top, cable modem, gateway and voice adaptor out there. And lots of consumer devices.

Still, people often refer to where we are now as “QAM.” Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Modulation, in general, defines how signals get imprinted onto a communications carrier, to get from here to there. Protocols define how the end points talk to each other. So, even when things are “all-IP,” they’ll still (in cable) move using QAM.

It was at the 2003 Cable Show when Bill Gates and Brian Roberts got to talking about whether and when the cable industry would go from all-digital, to all-IP. At the time, the conversation prompted headlines like “What The Heck Was Bill Gates Talking About?”

And here we are, a decade later. All-IP is still a matter of “when,” not “if.” It’s still the destination. And it’s still going to take a really long time to get there.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

 

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What Engineers Want From Marketers

If you’re a marketer, you already know what drives you nuts about engineers – and vice versa.

Usually, it festers around who calls the shots on new product development.

Marketers, and especially those with packaged goods experience, want earlier involvement.

Engineers usually hear this lament many months (or years) after they began writing densely technical, often inscrutable requirements. They want informed direction, sooner.

And then the wallop of “service velocity” hit. Gone is cable’s purgatory of “one new product every 18 months,” gated by legacy back office, conditional access, or guide issues. As Cox CTO Kevin Hart put it, during a CTAM Summit session last month: “Now, we’re doing 18 products in one year.”

The tech pieces accelerating product rollouts in cable are on a roll: Open standards, the migration to all-IP (Internet Protocol), and the prying open of back office components to remove proprietary hogties.

What’s on now is the workforce and cultural changes. And this is where you run into the lingo of “waterfall” vs. “agile” operations.

Primer: “Waterfall” means serial, step-by-step processes. Write a long requirements document. Get it into silicon. Test. Get it to device manufacturers. Test. Link into provisioning and billing systems. After all that, develop training, installation, customer care and – oh yes! – marketing plans.

“Agile” means working collaboratively, across departments, and in tandem. An “agile sprint” locks a small team into writing code that puts an existing feature into a companion service. Tech people call this “experience threading.” (My favorite example, for so many reasons: Voice mail that comes over as an email transcript.)

Cox, Comcast and others are already retuning the workforce for agility. Cox’s Hart meets all day on Tuesdays with the heads of marketing, product and operations — to review readiness checklists, prioritize resources, and liaison with call centers.

What do engineers want from marketers, these days? John Schanz, EVP of Network Engineering & Technical Operations for Comcast, seeks flexibility through the innovation process. “We need a give-and-take between the business, marketing and technology teams, even when you don’t really know exactly where the destination is.”

“Forge really tight partnerships across departments – that’s where the magic is,” said CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.