World Cup

A Wi-Fi Summer Tip Sheet

PHILADELPHIA–It was a full-on Wi-Fi binge at the Philly Tech It Out program here on 8/21, with one common refrain: When it comes to Wi-Fi, we’re still in the very, very early stages.

 

“We know it’s new and nifty, and know it adds value, but where it’s going to go is anybody’s bet,” said morning keynoter Ken Falkenstein, VP/Wireless Technology for Comcast. He added, for the benefit of the appreciable student presence: “You will have a marvelous career trying to get rid of the wires.”

 

Other highlights of the “Wi-Fi Everywhere” day, put on by the Philadelphia chapter of Women In Cable & Telecommunications:

 

Greyhound’s decision on its 100^th anniversary to put Wi-Fi spigots throughout its short-term rides reversed what had been the company’s smallest earner — and they can thank the millennial generation for it. “They gave us something we think we should have,” said Blaire Ballin, a senior at Ramapo College and Comcast summer intern.

 

Speaking of millennials: They’re a demanding bunch. Earlier this summer, she accidentally over-ran her data plan. Yes, she could’ve paid for more. But then again: “I have a hard time understanding that I have to pay for anything. Luxuries should just be there.”

 

(Just to bring your eyebrows back down: This same young woman also led a project that enabled a community of Guatemalan women to sell their woven goods over Wi-Fi.)

 

Sexy Wi-Fi numbers: Comcast expects to light up 8 million Wi-Fi “homespots” by year-end, calling the decision to install boxes comprised of both cable modem and Wi-Fi radio “the hockey stick moment.”

 

Time Warner Cable’s Wi-Fi footprint supports 17 million sessions per month; about a fifth of them come in from roaming partners, like Boingo. (Last summer, Time Warner was the first U.S. operator to partner with Boingo on Wi-Fi roaming — industrially known as HotSpot 2.0, with a consumer brand of Passpoint.)

 

The city’s regional rail line supports about 270,000 Wi-Fi sessions per month, with a load of 2.5 Terabytes of data transfer, said Bill Zebrowski, Senior Director of Information Technology for SEPTA, who quipped: “That’s a lot of Walking Dead.”

 

At the 2014 World Cup, in Brazil, 30% of the people sitting in the 241,033-seat Maracana Stadium got a connectivity fix over Wi-Fi, moving 5.6 terabytes of data over 217 access points, noted executives from Ruckuss Wireless.

 

Crazy stuff that’s coming: Wi-Fi that recharges your batteries. (What!?) Well, sort of. It’s called “wireless backscatter,” and is in the academic stages now as a way to make battery-less the sensors of the Internet of Things.

 

In closing: Focusing on one tech subject for an entire day takes guts! It worked. Kudos, WICT Philadelphia, for an outstanding event.

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

Take the “Instance,” For Instance…

Last week, while wandering through yet another “cloud” conversation, flagging unfamiliar terms to tackle, one came up over, and over, and over.

 

“Instance.” Another everyday word that takes on a completely different meaning, when speaking with Software People. (Not unlike “edge,” to Distribution Network People.)

 

Here’s an example, from that set of notes: “What that means in terms of scaling is that you can deploy instances much more on demand. So we were able to get instances scaled and deployed really fast, within a few seconds, and, as a result, all that new content, too.”

 

If you were to look up what “instance” means in software terms, you’d immediately bump into an “object.” Not an object like your keys, or anything you see near you right now, because the bitch of software is that it’s all pretty much invisible, unless you can see in code.

 

An “instance,” in this instance, is a glob of code, typically a software application, that no longer runs on its own special piece of hardware, which isn’t necessarily able to see or talk to other apps on other special pieces of hardware, that are also mission critical to whatever the purpose is.

 

In this case, the purpose is the sending of video — linear, on-demand, over the top, under the bottom, whatever — to the screen that wants to display it. And the “instance,” or “object,” is software speak for making that app run on general purpose servers, instead of vendor-specific gear.

 

The verb of the instance, is “to clone.” Let’s say the app’s purpose is ingesting and storing content. Instead of the “old way” of ingesting — either pulling it down from a satellite, or off of a backbone fiber, then pouring it into a purpose-built, probably proprietary storage server — the “cloud” way is to treat assets as “instances,” which can be cloned, nearly instantaneously.

 

Benefit: Finding and using storage space, quickly and efficiently. One of the good things about cloud — video or otherwise — is that it upends the (prior) need to submit a requisition for more storage, then wait four weeks, then order it, install it, and activate it.

 

That way is particularly snarly for those unexpected “surge moments.” In the world of IP, the peak metric item isn’t the Superbowl. It’s the FIFA World Cup. When sudden millions of people want something, in IP, it’s critical to be able to spin up compute, storage and connectivity resources, really fast. For instance.

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

 

 

 

“I Want The One With the Wi-Fis and the Big GBs!”

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.