capacity

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.

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.

 

The Difference Between “Capacity” and “Speed”

For those of us who remember such as a thing as a 1200 baud data connection, over a hissy, dial-up telephone connection, this may be hard to digest, but here it is: The “high-speed” part of “high speed data” hardly matters anymore.

Why: Because what matters more is capacity and throughput. Fast is fast, and fast is nearly ubiquitous, in North America. When was the last time you complained about a slow connection (hotel rooms excluded)? When was the last time a reboot of the modem didn’t fix it?

The marketing of data services, from the days of the dial-up telephone modem to now, uses speed as the basis for greatness. 1200 baud, 2400 baud, 9600 baud, all the way up to today’s offerings of 100 Gigabits per second and higher.

But there comes a time when the speed gains just aren’t noticeable anymore. At some point – let’s say 50 Mbps, like several operators now offer as a high-end tier – it’s difficult to discern whether that web page really loaded any faster.

Consider a home with five HDTVs, all on, and a cable modem attached to a wireless router spraying signal to five IP-devices, all doing something big – streaming video, or backing up files to a cloud-based server. In the same home, five VoIP phones, all in use.

All in, that house is consuming perhaps 30 Mbps of capacity, in that moment (assuming MPEG-2 compression on the video.) Yet their subscription tier supports, say, 10 Mbps downstream, and 2 Mbps upstream.

Herein lies the difference between “speed” (10 Mbps) and “capacity” (30 Mbps of usage on all screens.) One measures how fast one machine connects to another; the other measures how much stuff one can push through a connection.

Going forward, “fast” will be assumed. The differentiator will be the ability to serve up “fastness” to the increasing number of things in our lives that require or work better with an IP connection. Already, MSOs are anticipating an average of six IP-connected screens in homes by 2015; some friends in this geek-o-sphere already count 70+.

For cable, discussions about network capacity for IP-delivered services correspond to the channel bonding feature in DOCSIS 3.0. Already, some operators are bonding as many as four digital channels to carry IP-based traffic – web browsing and voice, of course, but also subscription video, both linear and on-demand.

Ultimately, to simulcast the linear lineup in IP, they’ll need to bond 24 to 30 digital channels.

By now, most major cable providers are mostly deployed with DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities. That’s good, because it’s designed to withstand what’s coming. In speed, and in throughput.

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