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SCTE Expo 2014: Capacity Observations

DENVER–Capacity. Always a hot ticket at tech fests, like the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineer’s annual Cable-Tec Expo, during a week of Colorado gorgeousness.  (The last time Expo graced Denver, we were Blizzard City.)

Here’s a weave of notable trends about capacity, gleaned from four jam-packed days of impressively nerdy tech-talk.

The next brink of capacity expansion maneuvers is at hand, and like the last time, engineers characterize their options as “tools in the toolbox.” Usually there are three. Last time, they were: Switched digital video; building out to 1 GHz, spectrally; and analog spectrum reclamation, to make room for all-digital.

Three is the number this time around, too. The front-runner: DOCSIS 3.1, the next grand slam in broadband capacity expansions, which doubles capacity in the forward/downstream and reverse/upstream signal directions. According to panelists at an all-day DOCSIS 3.1 Symposium preceding Expo, we’ll start seeing those modems and gateways sometime next year.

Second, and harder to swallow because it involves labor costs, is any of the many flavors of “fiber-deeper.” While it’s never fun to be the guy digging through the petunias to attach a new wire to the house, sometimes it just makes sense: New builds. After a catastrophic event.

It is in this category that you hear talk of “remote PHY,” “R-FOG,” and “distributed CCAP,” among others.

Option three goes higher again, spectrally — to 1.2 GHz, and even 1.7 GHz; the DOCSIS 3.1 spec mentions both. Nowadays, some operators built to 1 GHz; most sit at either 750 MHz or 860 MHz.

Going to 1.2 GHz tastes delicious, at first. Depending on the starting point — which involves how amplifiers are spaced on the wires — a move to 1.2 GHz bumps overall downstream capacity by as much as 60 percent. (What!)

Let’s do the math. Say the current spectral top is 750 MHz. If the new goal is 1.2 GHz, which is the same as 1200 MHz, the difference is 450 MHz. There’s the 60 percent.

Hang on! Turns out a power predicament accompanies a move to 1.2 GHz. Meaning a doubling of the power required to push amplifiers that high.

This all came to light at the tail end of an Arris-hosted breakfast on the last day of Expo, when a man in the audience, during the closing Q&A, asked about it.

It’s why we should all be glad for another Big Thing that happened during SCTE Expo: An effort, called Energy2020, to reduce power consumption “per unit” (per every component in a system, from “cloud to ground”) by 20%, by 2020. It’s an enormously ambitious goal, especially in the face of multiple “power hog” examples, like powering 1.2 GHz plant.

That’s the trajectory of capacity, if the trend lines of the SCTE Expo are true. Which they usually are.

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

Tasty Nugs from This Year’s NCTA Technical Papers

One of the greater developments following this year’s Cable Show, if you’re into immersion learning via tech-talk, is the placement online of the 2014 Spring Technical Forum papers. For free!

Up until now, it was a $50 DVD. Earlier, and for years, the papers came out as thick, bound editions. (A weary shelf at the office sags with Tech Papers dating back to the late ‘80s.)

If this is of interest, and you’d rather read them all yourself, go here: www.nctatechnicalpapers.com.

If you’d rather this (very abbreviated and likely to be continued!) summary, read on.

As titles go, few say “read me now!” more than “Predictions on the Evolution of Access Networks to the Year 2030 and Beyond,” written by five technologists at Arris (among them Tom Cloonan, CTO, who wins this year’s Mister Prolific Award, had we one, for writing or contributing to six papers.)

Shortcut advice on “Predictions:” If rushed, or impatient, skip to page 25. There, three pages characterize scenarios — some that impact all MSOs, others for MSOs planning to extend the life of existing plant, still others for MSOs going to new ways of bandwidth expansion, like Passive Optical Networks (PONs), which is tech talk for fiber-to-the-home.

Favorite line from “Predictions,” as an avid observer of cable’s upstream (home to headend) signal path: “Some of these MSOs will change the split on their upstream spectrum … in an attempt to provide more upstream bandwidth capacity.” Both 85 MHz and 204 MHz were mentioned as candidate upper boundaries for that terrifically thin spectral slice. (The very mention of a “widened upstream” was akin to operational anathema — as recently as two years ago.)

Trend-wise, the notion of “virtualization,” expressed as “SDN” (Software Defined Networks) and “NFV” (Network Function Virtualization) blitzed this year’s papers. It’s all about doing in software what’s done in hardware, now. Example: “Using SDN and NFV for Increasing Feature Velocity in a Multi-Vendor World,” by Cox’s Jeff Finklestein and Cisco’s Aron Bernstein.

Also: “An SDN-Based Approach to Measuring and Optimizing ABR Video Quality of Experience,” by the also-prolific Sangeeta Ramakrishnan (three papers) and Xiaoqing Zhu, both with Cisco.

Another tech trendline from the 2014 stash: Wi-Fi and wireless. Need a deep dive on why the batteries in your digital life behave the way they do? Go directly to “Wireless Shootout: Matching Form Factor, Application, Battery Requirement, Data Rates & Range to Wireless Standards,” by Comcast’s David John Urban. (Warning: It’s a deep-deep dive.)

If you’ve been wondering whether Wi-Fi has what it takes to stream multiple HD signals around a place, go to “Study of Wi-Fi for In-Home Streaming,” by Alireza Babaei, Neeharika Allanki and Vikas Sarawat, all with CableLabs.

There’s so much more.  Check them out for yourself, and be sure to thank Andy Scott, Mark Bell and their team at NCTA for doing the work of putting it all “on the line.”

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

What the Heck is QoS? Part 2 (Susie Riley, Doug Jones, Bob Cruickshank)

These two parts were filmed in 2006 at the SCTE Expo, and aired at the CTAM Summit. (Back in the days when the Expo was always in June, and CTAM in July.) In this segment, I check in with three QoS pros — Susie Riley, of Camient, Doug Jones, then with Big Band, and Bob Cruickshank, then with C-COR (now Arris) — to make the acronym more approachable for non-engineers.

Quote of the segment: “Quality of service is an amazing tool for marketers. Instead of taking 2 hours to download a movie, you can do it in 20 minutes. It’s a dream.”

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.

What the Heck is QoS? Part 1 (Susie Riley, Doug Jones, Bob Cruickshank)

These two parts were filmed in 2006 at the SCTE Expo, and aired at the CTAM Summit. (Back in the days when the Expo was always in June, and CTAM in July.) I ask three QoS-savvy individuals – Susie Riley of Camiant, Doug Jones of Big Band Networks, and Bob Cruikshank of C-Cor – to not only explain the attributes and importance of QoS, but also why it matters to cable marketers. Short version: The ability to run unflawed applications at higher speeds helps assure a quality consumer experience, and will take the broadband industry by storm.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.