SCTE Cable-Tec Expo

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.

What’s New in Wi-Fi: 802.11AC

Sometimes it’s worth it to stay until the bitter end. In this case, for a “What is Wi-Fi?” workshop, which ended at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon in a week that contained two back-to-back conventions – first CTAM Summit, then the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

Wi-Fi matters to cable providers for two reasons: One, as a way to make existing broadband customers more “sticky” by offering easy access to signal when on the go – doctor’s office, sporting event, train station. Two, for the potential revenues associated with helping other carriers (think mobile operators) to offload the huge volumes of data clogging their pipes.

This week’s translation attempts to condense that hour-and-a-half workshop, led by Jerry Patton, product manager / wireless network for Arris, and Daniel Howard, CTO of the SCTE. Here goes.

So: What’s new in Wi-Fi? “802.11 ac,” the latest shoptalk darling of Wi-Fi. In its sexier marketing finery, 802.11 ac goes by “Gigabit Wi-Fi.” So, theoretically, that means 1,000 Megabits per second. (What!) Compared to the fastest advertised broadband speed – 300 Mbps – that’s pretty zippy.

But hold on. Before going any further with Wi-Fi speeds, know that almost every number you hear is smaller or slower than it really is. There’s a physical rate, and then there’s an actual rate.

The physical rate is the “if all things are perfect” speed. In wireless (especially outdoors), things are never perfect.  Wireless access points are constantly besieged with noise. Impulse noise, ingress noise, spurious noise.

Actual throughput rates are typically 30-40% slower than what an access point may be capable of (physical rate), in perfect conditions. The rest is the overhead of re-sending whatever it is that got squelched by noise.

Here’s what to know about 802.11 ac: It works (only) in the 5 GHz band, which means that any “clients” (phones, tablets, laptops) equipped 2.4 GHz radios won’t work. (So far, only the Apple iPhone5 is plumbed with 802.11ac, but it’s early yet.)

Gigabit Wi-Fi gets to those willy-nilly speeds using a feature familiar to cable modem operations: Channel bonding, of up to 8 channels. In reality, it’s unlikely that eight clean, contiguous channels exist. Plus, recall that speed is a function of modulation, which almost always includes a tradeoff between speed and sturdiness.

So, watch for 802.11ac as more of an in-the-house thing (and when you replace your Wi-Fi router, make sure that it’s IPv6) than an outdoors thing.

Bonus round Wi-Fi shop talk: “Beam-forming.” It’s a way to bulge a Wi-Fi signal out toward the devices it serves, rather than shooting out signal omni-directionally.  The work of it can happen on chip, or in an antenna; best to ask. Also good to ask: How many streams it takes. Because every stream that’s beam-formed can’t be used for anything else.

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

 

 

 

Preview: CTAM Summit, SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Orlando

For someone passionate about making technology approachable to non-technical people, this week is a grand slam of cable conventions: CTAM Summit and the SCTE Cable Tec-Expo. Marketers and engineers, all in one place! Nirvana!

And hello again, Orlando. This location means one thing right off the bat: Brush up on your Full Service Network history (see Craig Leddy’s take on this here: http://www.multichannel.com/archive/orlando-revisited/139794), because you’ll likely hear more than a few nostalgic and/or instructive anecdotes about it.

For the tech-interested at CTAM Summit, check out self-professed gadget guru, author (“Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation”) and new-ish CEO of CableLabs, Phil McKinney, who kicks off a “Products Consumers Crave” panel on Tuesday at 9.  The session features chief technologists from Comcast, Cox and Charter (full disclosure: moderated by yours truly.)

In the topic mix: What technologists want from marketers; the operational impact of “service velocity;” maneuvering a software-heavy workplace, and the parallel industrial shift to “agile” development; cable’s changing role in innovation.

That’s all on the front part of the week. Then, on Wednesday, the marketers pull out, and the techies pull in.

What to watch for, news-wise, at this year’s SCTE Cable Tec Expo: Lots of detail about the next chapter in cable modems, now officially named “DOCSIS 3.1.”

Why: A session added to the Thursday morning schedule (11-12:30) aims to go long on the constituent components of DOCSIS 3.1. It’s all about wringing more capacity out of existing hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) networks, by tweaking things like modulation and error correction. (Yes, you can expect a full translation in a future edition.)

One of the great things about Cable Tec-Expo: Session repetition. This year’s technical workshops look chewy, and many of them repeat throughout the three-day tech-fest. Even with the session repeats, though, the 2012 lineup makes one want a clone.

On my short-list: “Is Your Network Capable of Handling the Next Generation of Services?”, “Slaying the Bandwidth Consumption Monster,” “Fast Times: Speed Tiers and Their Impact on Your Network,” and “Take 5: HTML5 in Cable.”

Also hot-looking (as hot goes): “Advanced Encoding for an Untethered World,” “CCAP Trial: The Verdict,” and “Springing New Leaks: A Look at New Sources of Interference.”

If there was an award for best session title (because that’s what the industry needs! More awards! ;-), it’d have to go to “Bandwidth Hunger Games.” Best acronym overload: “EPON, EPoC, DPoE, RFoG, DOCSIS – Beyond the Alphabet Soup.” (A typo in the online agenda makes it all the better: “FRoG.”)

Hope to see you there!

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