SCTE

AMSTERDAM–Nothing like back-to-back trade shows to kick in the jargon engines! First was IBC, in Amsterdam last week; SCTE Cable-Tec Expo hits Denver this week.

Three terms popped up with amusing regularity at IBC: “Workflow,” “cloud,” and “virtualization.” Translations follow.

Examples, from piles of notes: Workflows can be 4K, file-based, and complex. Workflows in production and distribution are changing because the video content lifecycle is changing, one IBC session aspired to explain; “build a future-proof media production workflow,” another hawked.

Translation: A “workflow” is telco- and IT-speak for a business policy that needs to be teased out (with an API!) of its legacy (old fart) bindings, then recombined, as a spew of data recognizable by other spews of data (sister API!), to do its intention. Turn it on, turn it off. Encrypt it, decrypt it. Code it, transcode it, decode it.

“Cloud,” as it relates to the non-atmospheric, needs an immediate and explicitly silent sabbatical of an indeterminate length. We will happily contribute to that here.

Which brings us to “virtualization.” Always just like that, wrapped in quote marks on the page, and spoken with accompanying air squiggles.

Here’s what’s going on with “virtualization.” Everything in our digital lives that was purpose-built is at a brink. Depending on the point of view, the camera that is just a camera, nothing else, or the phone that is just a phone, nothing else, might be on the endangered species list. Why, because it becomes a feature, and not just in your phone or tablet. It gets virtualized.

But! If your digital life is like mine, your phone’s camera is already better than your regular camera (which you think might be in the garage somewhere), and your phone’s phone is a pretty crappy experience.

So, in one sense, “virtualization” unleashes a potential software renaissance for the core workings of our digital stuff, to trick them out with a continuously improving webbing of software-created accouterment.

In another sense, “virtualization” casts some of the stuff in our gadget gardens into the digital doldrums. A digital doldrum device is anything you still own, but don’t use because you can’t find the charger, BluTooth-to-USB dongle, or other mission-critical thingie.

Ultimately, the answer depends on the degree of usefulness of the potential accouterments of the renaissance.

Either way, it’s coming. Because to virtualize is to gear up to work at “web speed,” like all companies “born on broadband” (name any over-the-top provider of anything) already do.

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

DENVER–Nothing like a fresh batch of data about broadband usage, topped off with the start of the FIFA World Cup Games — always a streaming video gauntlet — to check in on the Hype Central category that is Gigabit services.

The fresh data comes from Cisco System’s annual Visual Networking Index (VNI), released last week, which slices trends in broadband every which way — and serves as a perennial reminder to learn the nomenclature of big numbers: Petabyte, Yottabyte, Exabyte.

(Refresher: A Gigabyte (GB) is thousand Megabytes (MB); a Terabyte (TB) is a thousand Gigabytes; a Petabyte (PB) is a thousand Gigabytes; an Exabyte (EB) is a thousand Petabytes, and a Zettabyte (ZB) is a thousand Exabytes. Woof.)

Note: Those are measures of volume. Gigabit services, popularized by Google Fiber and AT&T, are measures of speed. Which makes this Cisco VNI nugget all the more notable:  “Global broadband speeds will reach 42 Mbps (Megabits per second) by 2018, up from 16 Mbps at the end of 2013.”

One Gbps is the same as 1,000 Mbps, in other words. Globally, we’re somewhere between 16 and 42 Mbps over the next few years. (That’s about two orders of magnitude off from 1,000 Mbps.)

The point: There comes a time, and we’re pretty much there, that things can’t load or behave noticeably faster. Which isn’t necessarily cause to do nothing, but neither is it a looming competitive catastrophe.

The topic of “Gigs” was a centerpiece discussion during last week’s 20^th annual Rocky Mountain SCTE Symposium, where lead technologists from Charter, Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable dove into the options for “getting to a Gig.”

Refresher: The entire carrying capacity of a modern (860 MHz) cable system, if every channel were empty and available (which they aren’t), is change north of 5 Gigabits per second. (That’ll double with DOCSIS 3.1’s new modulation and error correction techniques, known respectively as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing and Low Density Parity Check.)

Getting there, technologically and operationally, is rife with options. There’s the next chapter of DOCSIS, 3.1, and there’s a vendor community bursting with ways to take fiber deeper towards homes. (The vendor displays this year were “a lot more about glass” than in years prior, panelists noted.)

Has the time come that the cost comparison between DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber-deep strategies is close enough to parity for serious examination? No, panelists said (emphatically.) Taking fiber deeper may make sense in greenfield (new build) situations, but not yet in “brown field” (existing plant) conditions.

Nor is the SuperBowl the harbinger of peak traffic loads in IP, even though it’s the most watched television show (108 million-ish viewers.) This year’s “March Madness” NCAA men’s basketball tournament set Time Warner Cable’s new capacity peak for streamed video (exact numbers weren’t disclosed; it was “more than 10s of Gigs,” said TWC Engineering Fellow Louis Williamson.)

Comcast’s highest peaks come from its “Watchathon weeks,” when all programming is made available over IP. “They generate at least four times normal volume,” noted Allen Broom, VP/IP Video Engineering for Comcast.

Do Gigabit services matter? Sure. Should operators drop other technology priorities to build it? Google “red herring.”

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

Cable’s technical community heads to Atlanta next week for the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, guaranteed to be a maze of impressively nerdy tech talk. Here’s a preview of likely lingo.

Predictive Distortions and CPE Spectrum Analysis: This one’s all about some seriously good stuff happening in field operations, which is the ability to predict plant problems, with location, based on distortion signatures.

This leads directly to “CPE Spectrum Analysis,” where the CPE stands for Customer Premise Equipment. It means operators can reduce the tried-and-true spectrum analyzer (which are spendy) into code inside a set-top, modem or gateway.

Yotta, as in that’s a yotta data: Big data is a theme at Expo, just as everywhere else. “Yotta” is the prefix for biggest unit of measurement there is, for numbers. As a word, it’s a septillion. In the order of things, it goes “kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta.”

Yotta comes into play in cable tech when thinking through how to deal with big volumes of data – like when you’re polling, say, 40 million pieces of CPE, every 10 minutes.

The Combining Network. One of the black arts in any cable headend is the combining network. It’s the last thing that happens before everything goes into the laser to shoot out onto fiber, then coax, then homes. It’s critical, because it’s the thing that combines multiple, outbound video channels together for the ride to subscribers.

Often derided as “a rats nest,” the combining network is a hot tech topic because it will change, and maybe even go away, as the transition to IP (Internet Protocol) marches on. That’s good news from a reduction-of-complexity perspective, but it’s a brain-melter to think through.

Bufferbloat Mitigation: In data networks, buffers exist to make sure bits don’t bunch up when pipes get crowded. With so much video moving over the Internet, buffers are already starting to bloat, which causes quality issues.

Rolaids aren’t an option. Nor does the historical remedy work: Throwing more bandwidth at it. Which is why bufferbloat mitigation falls into the “likely lingo” hat at this year’s Expo.

There’s more! So much more! We’ll bring it all back for you….

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

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.

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.

At the 2006 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, I moderated the annual CTO Panel, which included Marwan Fawaz/Adelphia and Charter (“Chartelphia!); Dave Fellows/Comcast, Dr. Paul Liao/Panasonic, and Vince Roberts/Disney, ABC. This closing segment hits on tech policy, DOCSIS 3.0, channel bonding, and “sling” media.

Video courtesy SCTE.

At the 2006 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, I moderated the annual CTO Panel, which included Marwan Fawaz/Adelphia and Charter (“Chartelphia”!); Dave Fellows/Comcast, Dr. Paul Liao/Panasonic, and Vince Roberts/Disney, ABC. This section discusses enhancements to video (ETV), specialized branding, and OCAP.

Video courtesy SCTE.

At the 2006 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, I moderated the annual CTO Panel included Marwan Fawaz, then in transition between Adelphia and Charter (“Chartelphia!”; Dave Fellows/Comcast, Paul Liao/Panasonic, and Vince Roberts/Disney, ABC. In this first section we discuss video, bandwidth, and switched digital video.

Video courtesy SCTE.

At the 2001 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, I wandered the show floor in search of the new and interesting. In this segment, Ken Kraft, Director of Business Development for Tellabs Broadband, explains the company’s voice-over IP migration strategy and shares some of the changes he’s seen in telephony over the last eight years.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.

At the 2001 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, I wandered the show floor in search of the new and interesting. Hot in ’01: Bandwidth expansion, IP technologies, and switching. We start with Bow Rogers, CEO of BigBand Networks, to discuss how digital packets are sent from the headend to the home. Rogers explains a new type of “video router” and the benefits it intends to provide to MSOs and consumers.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.