Service Providers Archive

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AT&T Mobility Maps New Biz Models To Support Expanded Device Ecosystem

By
charlie
Posted in: Mobile Services & Devices, Service Providers

June 10, 2009 – AT&T Mobility has embarked on an ambitious initiative aimed at driving wireless into every device imaginable in conjunction with a forthcoming doubling of 3G bandwidth and ongoing explorations into new approaches to service pricing and retail distribution of devices.

The new vision, inspired by the success of the iPhone, was laid out by Glenn Lurie, president of emerging devices and resale for AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, at the recent Connections conference in Santa Clara. With mobile penetration now at 87 percent in the U.S., the industry’s future growth will depend on “embedding everything with wireless,” Lurie said.

Noting his emerging devices unit is just six months old, Lurie said uncertainties as to just what his mandate would be at the outset have quickly given way to a clear understanding that there is a tremendous revenue opportunity associated with connecting everything from e-books and netbooks to automobiles and freight containers to the mobile network. He cited one study from StrategyAnalytics that forecasts there will be an installed base of 100 million connected consumer electronics devices beyond traditional handsets by 2014 and another study from Rethink Wireless that forecasts operator revenues from such “non-handset” devices will hit $90 billion in 2013.

“There’s not a single OEM (original equipment manufacturer) or chip manufacturer or software manufacturer who’s not all over this right now,” Lurie said.

The spark to innovation in this arena has been the success of the iPhone, he said, noting there have been 5.9 million iPhone 3G devices activated and over one billion applications from the Apple app store downloaded during the past three quarters. “Two years ago there wasn’t a device with an open browser,” he said. “Now they all have open browsers. There were no app stores. Now there are 70.”

As a proponent of and a lead negotiator in AT&T’s exclusive iPhone deal with Apple, Lurie has won his company’s confidence in the idea that building ecosystems that can leverage connectivity to enhance consumer demand for devices is key to driving new business. For example, he said, AT&T is working with various manufacturers to transform e-books into “e-readers” that will expand on what Amazon has done with its Kindle.

“There are going to be plenty of OEMs out there who want to take them on,” Lurie said, in reference to the Kindle and Amazon’s “Whispernet” affiliation with Sprint’s EVDO network. “We’re talking to lots of folks who want to go into that space.”

Thin, flexible e-reader screens now in prototype stages with Bluetooth connectivity to keyboards will deliver magazines and newspapers and could even serve as users’ primary computing devices, he suggested. There will be a “giant ecosystem” behind the emerging e-reader phenomenon, he predicted, adding that AT&T’s opening play in this space will come in the “short term.”

Netbooks, the nine- to ten-inch screen minicomputers, together with the five-inch screen MIDs with touchscreen keypads represent another important arena for embedding wireless connectivity, Lurie said. Netbooks, the only computer category showing year-to-year sales growth this year, are projected by Gartner to hit 7.8 million unit sales by year’s end. Unit sales of mobile connected MIDs – “smartphones on steroids,” as Lurie called them – will hit 1.6 million by 2011, according to Parks Associates.

While traditional computer manufacturers are bringing mobile-enabled netbooks and MIDs to market, there’s also significant momentum for such devices coming from the mobile handset manufacturing side, Lurie noted. “They’re coming at it from a different angle” where designs are built around the wireless functionality, he added.

The growing phenomenon of cloud computing will contribute to the appeal and to the usefulness of mobile connectivity where these devices are concerned, he said. By offloading storage and processing requirements the devices save on power consumption, even to the point of not requiring fans, thereby extending battery life and their applicability as mobile devices, he noted.

“The cloud is going to play a huge role,” he said. “It involves everything from security to how data is stored to how it’s downloaded.”

AT&T’s embedded device push is also targeting navigation, multimedia connectivity and other functionalities built into new cars, Lurie said. “The connected car may be one of the biggest things we talk about,” he added.

Lurie noted the embedded device ecosystem initiative goes hand in hand with the company’s commitment to doubling its 3G bandwidth starting with deployments later this year as the next step in the evolution to 4G. This so-called “3 1/2 G” capability employing High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 technology supports peak download speeds of 7.2 megabits per second compared to 3.6 mbps over the current HSPA implementation, with actual speeds typically below peak based on local traffic volume and other factors.

AT%26T has also announced it will nearly double its 3G wireless spectrum in conjunction with expanding 3G availability to another 20 metro areas, bringing the total to nearly 370 by year’s end. The company is also adding 2,100 cell sites and expanding backhaul capacity to accommodate anticipated surges in traffic as HSPA 7.2 and 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) capabilities come on line.

The implications of expanded network capacity and device connectivity have stirred AT&T to rethink its business models and retail distribution strategies, Lurie said. “We have to start with a clean sheet of paper with business models,” he asserted, noting the emerging strategy is to embrace an open approach that includes retail and wholesale models and a much more flexible pricing strategy.

For example, given that the connected device lineup will include cameras that allow users to immediately transmit photos to their own or others’ libraries,”How much do you pay for sending a picture to Grandma?” Lurie asked. Paying per picture rather than having to subscribe to a monthly service might be the right approach, he said.

Similarly, it might make sense to sell day passes to allow computer users to access the network when they’re on the road even if they may not be regular AT&T mobile subscribers. “We don’t do that now,” Lurie said. “We have to change our pricing strategies. The whole way we do service around these devices has to change.”

Where device sales are concerned AT&T has already experimented in a 16-store trial with distribution of netbooks along with the usual handsets. “What if at the AT&T Mobility store you could get all types of devices? That’s the way it should be,” Lurie suggested. But he acknowledged that one of the lessons learned with the netbook trial is that selling computers “isn’t as simple as selling RIMs (Research in Motion handsets).”

Much remains to be accomplished, including creating what the company calls “unconscious connectivity” that allows users to make use of device connections and to be billed in accord with the device and subscription profiles without any sign-up or log-in requirements. “We’re not there yet,” Lurie acknowledged.

In fact, the company wasn’t ready to implement two new features – tethering and multimedia messaging – recently introduced by Apple for its next model of the iPhone, presumably because they involve changes in pricing and provisioning strategies along the lines outlined by Lurie.

Tethering, allowing the iPhone to connect as a wireless modem to computers, and multimedia messaging, which supports transferring media over the mobile network, are in the offing, AT&T said. A spokesman told the New York Times the delay on these features was not network related.

The exploding bandwidth and functionalities surrounding wireless also pose a problem for AT&T strategically where it’s wireline business is concerned, Lurie noted. “With everything going wireless, are you innovating on a wireline network or on wireless?” he asked. “That’s one of our biggest concerns.”

The role of voice in an increasingly all-data world is especially troublesome, he added, noting that none of the devices he discussed at the Connections conference were equipped with voice capabilities. “The emerging device space will change everything you do,” he said.

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AT&T Achieves Strategic Gain with Next-Gen Compression

By
charlie
Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

Bart Spriester, VP & GM for SP digital media networks, Video Technology Group, Cisco Systems

Bart Spriester, VP & GM for SP digital media networks, Video Technology Group, Cisco Systems

May 25, 2009 – AT&T is employing improved video compression technology in conjunction with optimizing bit rates to suit the needs of individual content streams to greatly increase the effective capacity of the VDSL2 lines it uses to deliver its U-verse TV service.

“We’re using the most sophisticated compression technology available – advanced, second-generation MPEG-4 – for U-verse, unlike some competitors that use an older standard,” says an AT&T official, speaking on background in an e-mail response. “With this advanced technology, we’re able to deliver compressed video without sacrificing video quality or performance. The benefit to customers is that they can get more and better services, with the same superior level of quality.”

The implementation of the new compression system, which sources say reduces the HDTV bit rate, not counting overhead, to 5 megabits per second even for high-action sports, tracks with assurances given by AT&T CTO John Donavan at a Goldman Sachs conference in September that the company would be able to launch a 5-mbps-capable HD service early this year. Where the company had set the limit for simultaneous HD streams at two, the new technology supports three, which is widely deemed to be sufficient to meeting current consumer demand in upscale households. However, the company says it has not implemented a three-stream HD capability at this point.

The AT&T source also notes that the company is getting more channel-carrying capacity out of the VDSL2 links by varying the bit rate according to the amount required by a given video program at a given time, in contrast to constant bit rate (CBR) delivery, which sets the rate at a level required for the most motion-packed sequences in a given program. While capped variable bit rate (VBR), which doesn’t allow the bit rate to go higher than the ceiling set for the individual SD and HD channels streams, has been used before, the caps have not always been high enough to accommodate especially high motion-intensive sequences, resulting in less than optimum quality.

Now the question is whether the cap has been lowered farther, from the previous 6 to 8 mbps, to 5. Asked whether the company is now serving HD at 5 mbps, the AT&T source replies, “It’s not that simplistic.” With variable rate encoding, the source says, “the rate required for a video stream is not constant. It varies based on the picture being displayed. For example, an image with a high level of detail or action (such as a play in a football game) uses a higher rate than an image with less motion or less detail (such as the sportscasters talking in the studio).”

That said, 5 mbps appears to be viewed as sufficient to deliver the quality AT&T is looking for. While not saying who the customer is, Cisco Systems, the long-time supplier of encoding and other headend gear to AT&T, has provided its newest MPEG-4 compression system to a “Tier 1 network operator with the highest DSL penetration,” says Bart Spriester, vice president and general manager for digital media networks in the service provider segment of Cisco’s Video Technology Group. “This is a commercially operating next-generation compression system that is delivering sports programming in 1080p format at 5 mbps” with “exceptional quality,” Spriester says. “It’s pretty impressive.”

The commercial use of the system in the U.S. and abroad puts Cisco ahead of competitors who have announced similar 5 mbps HD capabilities slated for availability in June and beyond (see April ScreenPlays, p. 15). Spriester attributes the speed to market advantage to the fact that the company relies on FPGA (field programmable gate array) processors, which provide a platform for initiating all-software upgrades as new advances are accomplished in the H.264 domain of the MPEG-4 standard.

“The rest of the industry is more reliant on ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) technology, which limits their flexibility to pull the lever on advances,” he says. “We rely on FPGA implementations that are 100 percent software based.” Like its competitors, Cisco is pushing the envelope on H.264 by continually refining how the many extensions of the standard are implemented and by bringing new extensions into play.

As dramatic as the gains have been since H.264 went into commercial operation, there are more to come, experts say. Donavan, in his meeting with analysts last year, predicted that AT%26T would be able to go below the 5 mbps benchmark. Moreover, he noted, AT&T’s Total Home DVR service, launched in September with the capacity to deliver two live HD streams and three from the DVR simultaneously over coaxial cable in the home will exploit the compression advances to move to three live and four recorded HD streams this year, he said.

These advances have major implications for AT&T’s strategic direction, with regard to both its need to increase Internet access speeds over the same DSL lines that support IPTV and its ambitions to move away from dependence on wireline service.

Where broadband is concerned, the company announced in April that it would offer a top-tier access rate of 18 mbps exclusively to U-verse TV customers, which, with the new video compression in operation, would still leave sufficient capacity for most U-verse households to access at least two simultaneous HD streams. Because the data rates drop off at longer distances, it was unclear how broadly available the 18 mbps broadband service would be, but officials indicated it would be offered fairly ubiquitously across the U-verse footprint.

From the long-term strategic standpoint, the improvement in throughput capacity over the fiber-to-the-node network built to support U-verse could have a major impact on capital spending. Already AT&T has indicated it is pulling back on the pace of ongoing U-verse network buildouts, which CEO Randall Stephenson justified during the company’s first quarter earnings conference as a “more rational” approach to expansion insofar as the original pace required hiring more people than the company could keep over the long haul. Now, with the expansion rate reduced to under four million per year through 2011, or by about a third from the originally announced plan, there may be further capital cost reductions resulting from the fact that improved compression may eliminate the need to drive fiber deeper or to bond circuits to create twice the throughput over VDSL2, as was previously proposed.

The company reported that, as of the end of Q1, it had 1.3 million U-verse TV customers, marking a 284,000 quarterly gain compared to a gain of 264,000 in the final quarter of ’08 and a gain of 148,000 in Q1 ’08. It said its U-verse TV penetration rate was in the “mid teens” in markets where it had been marketing the service for 18 months or more.

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Broadband Forum, IP/MPLS Forum Merge To Produce End-to-End Broadband Specs

By
charlie
Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

George Dobrowski, chairman & president, Broadband Forum

George Dobrowski, chairman & president, Broadband Forum

May 18, 2009 – Having spent more than a decade looking from opposite ends down the same broadband service delivery pipe, the home- and access-network-focused Broadband Forum and the core- and aggregation-network-focused IP/MPLS Forum formally announced their merger on May 18, promising to fill critical gaps in efforts to develop an end-to-end multiservice architecture for next-generation broadband services.

United under the Broadband Forum name, the new organization will comprise an enlarged membership of 220 companies comprising most of the world’s leading telecoms along with equipment manufacturers, chip vendors and industry bodies.

“Verizon has been an active contributing member of both organizations, and we applaud this decision to unite,” said Stu Elby, vice president, network architecture, for Verizon Communications. “As broadband convergence continues, the Broadband Forum will be a key organization to ensure providers’ needs are met with a holistic end-to-end perspective [with] no gaps in critical network specifications. We look forward to continuing to provide technical expertise and leadership to this organization.”

Added Philippe Lucas, vice president of international standards and industry relationship for Orange: “We are very enthusiastic to see the industry defragmenting. This union will allow better efficiency and coherence for some key topics, such as transport equipment interoperability, mobile backhauling, access and core networks integration. We believe this union will provide better architectural view on the evolution of networks.”

According to George Dobrowski, chairman and president of both the former and new Broadband Forum, the complementary and sometimes overlapping work of both bodies made their merger a logical step. Both bodies enjoyed considerable common membership; both were already focused on driving the evolution of next-generation IP networks; and both had expanded their scopes to address technical and business requirements across home, access, core and carrier-to-carrier interconnect networks

Membership of BBF will grow six to eight percent “because we already have a lot of overlap,” Dobrowski said. “That was one of the rationales to make the most efficient use of our member companies.

“The merger will help ensure that we have seamless broadband network optimization and convergence,” he said. “And during these economic times, it made sense to make ourselves as efficient as possible” by reducing duplicative technical specification development and other work, often by members who had been forced to work simultaneously on certain solutions through separate organizations.

“As two separate organizations, we had to liaise as we were developing requirements that were dependent on the other organization’s work,” he explained. “We’ll be able to expedite that process. We will have more resources, wider expertise and the ability to make rapid strides in areas such as defining seamless end-to-end specifications, fostering greater interoperability, delivering enhanced quality-of -experience measurement, enabling greater mobile backhaul capabilities and supporting residential and business services.”

The IP/MPLS Forum has produced a dozen major industry specifications including those for IP backbone transport, virtual private network (VPN), MPLS-based mobile backhaul and, most recently, Carrier Ethernet. “We recently completed a certification test suite for MPLS mobile backhaul and circuit emulation over MPLS for TDM services,” said Andrew Malis, former IP/MPLS Forum chairman and president, and now vice president of the Broadband Forum.

Started in 1994 as the ADSL Forum, then DSL Forum and, in 2005, the Broadband Forum, the BBF has developed key access, control and home network specifications now regularly used as vendor requirements by network operators who represent 30 percent of overall BBF membership worldwide. In particular, BBF’s Broadband Home, Architecture and Transport, Testing, Operations and Marketing working groups have developed the TR 069 and TR-106 specifications to characterize the configuration and remote management of devices attached to consumer and business local area networks and to managed services provided by network operators.

“To improve customer experiences across all managed services, we need to have a consistent way of defining object models and parameters to manage devices for services to be delivered right down to the end device consuming the content,” Dobrowski said. “In home specifications, we’ve been working with groups like 3GPP who have adopted and collaborated on our management specs, for example.

“Our focus on technology-agnostic solutions doesn’t change,” he added. “We do develop technology-specific requirements” such as those for ADSL, VDSL and GPON access, “but not to the exclusion of any other technologies. We’ll continue to address specifications with MPLS being a big part of that for the core network. We will be guided by the service and application requirements of carriers and end users.”

Among other ongoing efforts, the new BBF will continue the IP/MPLS Forum’s mobile backhaul certification pilot, a project that leverages MPLS to provide support for multi-service applications with hierarchal QoS over a Circuit Emulation Services transport architecture that supports TDM, ATM, IP and Ethernet backhaul. Vendors already certified in Phase 1 of the initiative include Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Huawei and Juniper Networks, and more vendor testing is in progress, Malis said.

“We also will continue Carrier Ethernet Network Infrastructure work,” he noted. “Technology is already developed in the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] for virtual private LAN services, but that’s not enough. We’re expanding on IETF work to add QoS, resilience requirements, the ability to monitor traffic, support stacked Ethernet tags and so on” with some of that work “just getting underway.”

The new BBF will continue liaisons with a broad portfolio of industry consortia and standards bodies, including the IETF, ITU, Metro Ethernet Forum, Optical Internetworking Form, MultiService Forum, DVB, ATIS, ETSI, IEC, UPnP, DLNA and Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).

According to Malis, the two organizations already were starting to work together on a number of projects. “We’re ending up with convergence in service providers and vendors,” he said, “so it makes sense to have convergence in standards as well.”

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New IPTV App Paradigm Delivers Potent Mix of TV and Web Assets

By
charlie
Posted in: Consumer Services, Service Providers

Mauro Bonomi, CEO, Minerva Networks

Mauro Bonomi, CEO, Minerva Networks

April 27, 2009 – The days of bifurcation between what is TV and what is Web content are about to end with the coming of middleware platforms that blend assets from the two media sources on the fly.

Until now, the thinking about bringing Web content to the TV has been all about simply enabling a formatting process that translates over-the-top content to TV viewing, with some variations that visualize deeper adaptation of Web video for the TV experience through intermediary manipulations on the part of service providers or others. But a true blend of the two that can dynamically tap specific assets from any source and combine them into a single viewing experience that scales to millions of viewers and changes swiftly with new ad and programming cycles has been impossible.

“The ingredients are in play for IPTV operators to finally take advantage of the Internet and really deliver on the promise of TV 2.0,” says Mauro Bonomi, CEO of middleware supplier Minerva Networks. “If you look ahead, a number of platform providers including Microsoft, Minerva and others are creating the environment that will allow service providers to begin exploiting these capabilities in the second half of this year.”

Minerva, with the forthcoming release of version 4.0 of its platform, and Microsoft, with general release of what it calls the Presentation Framework component of its Mediaroom middleware at the start of this year, are transforming the applications development environment by allowing developers to position apps in the cloud as Web services. Typically, such apps include widgets (chunks of code) that can be pulled into IPTV content streams by commands from the middleware. Once the widgets are embedded in the content stream, users can engage with the applications as if they resided on the set-top.

“Unlike many other app engines, with Presentation Framework there’s no software stack sitting in the client,” says Shari Barnett, director of media services at Microsoft’s Connected TV unit.
“It’s all in the network, leveraging the set-top as a Web-connected device.”

Hints of what’s in store have been on view at demonstrations offered by Microsoft and its content partners starting last year in September at the IBC conference in Amsterdam, following beta release of Presentation Framework to 100 developers, and extending to the recent NAB conference in Las Vegas. Using the framework building blocks, Associated Press, for example, unveiled a new applications strategy at the CES show in January which it hopes will seed its news content into the TV entertainment environment, vastly expanding its reach and exposure.

AP, working with Canadian applications developer ES3, built an automated AP news ticker that delivers headlines directly through the Mediaroom TV Dashboard, allowing IPTV subscribers to access local news and information while watching other TV programming content. AP is also offering a “red carpet” feed featuring news, photos and video clips from high-profile celebrity events. Both applications can be implemented by Mediaroom-based service providers who contract directly with AP.

“With Microsoft Mediaroom, AP is crossing a significant milestone in its mission to explore new digital outlets for AP and its member news organizations,” notes Jeffrey Litvack, AP’s general manager for mobile and emerging products. “With these applications, viewers could simultaneously access breaking news from across the nation without missing a second of their favorite television program, movie, live entertainment or sporting event.”

“These AP applications are accessing existing Web servers and bringing the content to the TV,” Barnett notes. “Options presented to the viewer allow you to pick and choose bits and pieces from AP. There’s nothing pre-set in the content stream; no need for the IPTV content and the app to talk to each other.”

BBC, too, is shopping Web-based ITV apps developed in cooperation with emuse on the Microsoft platform to promote wider distribution of a car-themed sitcom called “Top Gear.” The apps allow viewers to tap Web-based clips, car reviews and other information and even entire past shows. And Turner Sports and PGA of America, working with ES3, have developed an application that allows viewers to switch dynamically between camera feeds, watch golfing instructional videos and click from static to video advertisements.

As seen in demonstrations, these ITV experiences are compellingly rendered in a seamless, latency-free way that’s a far cry from the early days of ITV. That it is all being done through on-the-fly compilation of content residing on the Web with the IPTV content is all the more impressive. “These aren’t canned demos,” Barnett says. “It’s all happening in real time using Web assets.”

Barnett’s group is in the process of rewriting the Mediaroom user interface to exploit the functionalities of the Presentation Framework, she notes. “We’re evolving our on-demand UI right now,” she says.

Where, today, developers can’t get to the metadata that lives on the VOD server, the new UI will expose APIs that make the metadata accessible, thereby allowing developers to create applications that don’t have to be embedded in the UI. With the positioning of the entire UI in Presentation Framework the Mediaroom guide will essentially be distributed as an application that can be frequently changed, whereas it originally was hard coded to pull data in a set way. “For us, in terms of how we evolve the guide going forward, it’s the difference between tweaking and having to recode every time we want to do something different,” Barnett says.

While these are early days in the transition to this new approach to ITV, Bonomi believes there’s an explosive potential for service differentiation in the IPTV space following the app-store model that has swept the mobile phone market. “You need three things – a large applications base, a set of widgets and an open commercial environment like the Apple iPhone app store,” he says.

“The concept that the platform vendor can host a set of applications that can be delivered over the top to a managed network is very appealing,” he continues. By working through such app stores with multiple platform vendors developers will be able to maximize the reach of their Web-based apps, thereby overcoming the restrictions now imposed in one-to-one development scenarios.

The IPTV footprint is expanding at an accelerating pace. In the case of Mediaroom, its reach hit the 1.5-million household mark last September and now stands at three million. AT%26T, already pushing the app envelope with whole-home DVR, TV-based Yellow Pages, scheduling of DVR recordings via mobile and much else in the U-verse space, is upgrading its Mediaroom foundation to accommodate Presentation Framework throughout its service area, Barnett notes.

There are now about 60 development companies worldwide working with Mediaroom’s 20 or so service provider customers to create applications. While Microsoft opened the Mediaroom APIs to the developer community last year, it’s “not a completely open program yet,” Barnett says, noting the developers who are in the game get there through partnerships either with Microsoft directly or with the service providers individually.

“I feel a little bit like a matchmaker,” she says. “Customers are coming to me with different ideas and saying who would be good to work with to develop this. It’s hard for me to gauge effectiveness, because most of these applications haven’t been deployed yet.”

The availability of the Presentation Framework has quickened the pace of development, she adds. With so many assets positioned on the Web, programmers now have an opportunity to drive viewership by drawing those assets into the TV experience working with developers like ES3 and emuse, thereby creating an environment that service providers can tap into without doing development work themselves.

“With Presentation Framework we’re also creating an interactive environment with advertising as an incentive for cooperation,” Barnett notes. “You can have a real partnership with people on the Web who want to partner with service providers to offer their content through TV – an eBay channel, for example. Operators will look at this and realize they can move beyond subscription and other traditional TV models to expand their content options.”

Bonomi notes the new Web-based app paradigm will also allow widgets to be used to bring Web-based social networking applications to the TV. “There’s no reason not to bring all the social experience of the Web to the TV set,” he says.

“The system knows which channel you’re watching and is able to access the metadata of that channel, allowing the information to go over Internet to your friends via their social networks to show them your preferences and allow them to discover the content,” he explains. Further illustrating the types of applications that could be initiated in the social networking space, Bonomi notes that, on the receiving end, a user who gets a recommendation from a friend would be able to schedule a recording of the video “with a single click.”

“The key is to leverage the Web the way it is, using technology like ours to capture preset data out there on the Internet to enhance the TV experience,” Bonomi says. “This is the natural way to enhance TV experience, which is the great advantage of IPTV.”

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Cisco Pitches Comprehensive Mobile Broadband Vision

By
charlie
Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

Kittur Nagesh, director, service provider marketing, Cisco Systems

Kittur Nagesh, director, service provider marketing, Cisco Systems

April 27, 2009 – With data services claiming a quarter share of mobile operator revenues in early 2009, Cisco Systems is moving beyond its powerbase in fixed telecom to support what it calls a transformative change in worldwide mobile infrastructure and business models.

In April Apple Electronics’ iPhone App Store reported downloading its one billionth mobile data application. Even a tough economy has yet to substantially quash consumer appetites for upgrading to increasingly data-centric mobile handsets, says ABI research, which revised upward its predictions for 2009 handset sales after reporting 258 million shipped worldwide in Q1.

Mobile data services also are establishing real monetary value. U.S. data service share of mobile operator average revenue per user grew from 19.3 percent to 25 percent between 2007 and 2008, reaching $34 billion, according to mobile industry consultant Chetan Charma. With competitive share of such substantial new revenues at stake, mobile operators cannot afford to make the transformation to IP networks and adjust to attending business model challenges without a comprehensive technology-based strategy, says Kittur Nagesh, director of service provider marketing for Cisco.

In its own latest “Visual Networking Index” research, this one devoted specifically to mobile, Cisco found that mobile data traffic increased 66 fold in 2008, most of it driven by video applications. More than a basic shift from circuit- to packet-based infrastructure – and more than a shift to higher capacity networks to accommodate bandwidth-intensive applications like video entertainment and productivity applications that incorporate video – the mobile data invasion will require new levels of personalization and network intelligence, as well as speed, Nagesh says.

“4G represents the first time the mobile industry is moving to all-IP network architecture,” he says. “All operators are looking at the app store model, and all the apps are IP, not just voice. We feel it’s transformation, not just evolution. In earlier generations, IP was not reaching the end customer. Now the path is open to media applications, and we feel the business models of the past will change.”

In Cisco’s view, mobile operators and their partners are being forced to revisit not only the pace and nature of non-voice capacity requirements, but also two other key factors: a dramatic change in service mix and the proliferation of mobile-connected devices.

In terms of service mix, device- or network-specific applications, like those offered through the AT%26T-Apple partnership, along with Web services like Flickr, YouTube and social networking “add up to a dramatic change beyond voice,” Nagesh says. “There has to be a new way of looking at how to make money and how to drive incremental video.

“Consumer behavior can’t be mandated,” he adds. “They’re learning from the Internet and applying it to mobile, but Internet models don’t match carrier models. Monetization is no longer, ‘Every call is giving me x cents.’ On the data side, the equation is different. If it is Skype, how can I drive more video? You have a buddy list on Skype. Can’t I make that list available on the handset to make a call, either over 3G or IP? That can be done in a transparent manner through SIP [Session Initiation Protocol].”

Achieving monetization goals by driving adoption of video and other rich broadband services means that “the network needs to be intelligent enough to charge in ways beyond all-you-can-eat,” he says. “We’ve heard of some customers consuming 890 gigabytes a month. If you just download one movie, it’s generally over five gigabytes,” based on consumption tests conducted by Time Warner Cable in Texas. “So for high quality applications, the amount of data is huge. That calls for intelligent policies for fair usage and to reflect partnerships and factors like backhaul capacity. New radio technologies may give operators scale, but intelligence is key to monetization. Operators are revisiting what all this means.”

Capacity and policy demands also are being accelerated by the emergence of larger VGA screen media players, automotive receivers and other new classes of mobile devices, many of which are designed to support the coming rich mixture of service types, including video, viral content sharing and broadband interactivity.

Cisco notes that, in addition to nearly five billion existing handsets and continuing high volume device sales in developing countries like China and India, one must add a raft of devices built for machine-to-machine applications – many of those also destined to support increasingly intelligent applications. Remote monitoring cameras, for example, will support triggers to shift transmissions from low-speed to high definition video streams.

Such machine-to-machine devices, along with various remote meters and kiosks “still need to be authenticated, equaling a significant impact on the control plane,” the seat of intelligence in the network, Nagesh says. “They also need to be integrated to billing. When the remote camera switches to HD, policies executed at the control plane are required to charge in a very personalized way. We expect billions of such devices.”

And here is where Cisco believes it has the goods that operators particularly need, in the form of relatively new Cisco products like the ASR 9000 application-intelligent edge router. “Often with control functions people think of appliances,” Nagesh says, “but that won’t scale, because you can’t put those boxes everywhere.”

For certain levels of required intelligence, such as discovering and connecting to faster wireline connections through Wi-Fi or femtocell access points, intelligence embedded in client devices themselves is highly useful. “With IP you can more easily leverage wireline assets,” he notes. “Pureplay wireless operators really need to think through this. Wireline backhaul is compelling as UMA [Unlicensed Mobile Access] and femto are deployed,” he argues.

However, he adds, “Policy rules and creating scale – where everything doesn’t need to go to a central point – can benefit from network intelligence. A service like single number reach cannot come just from the client. And for many services like high-quality video you need to traffic shape. You may want to do things like cap MMSs for children. These are network capabilities.”

In recent months, mobile operators have certainly begun to address “the first choke point” – the backhaul segment of their networks – by deploying Carrier Ethernet, Pseudowire and other technologies that are “gracefully moving to IP” while also introducing a first phase of heightened network intelligence in the form of traffic shaping, security and billing integration, Nagesh says. “The nice thing is, with any 4G, your investment in the backhaul and IP are protected because they remain the same, and that part of the job is essentially recession proof. They have to upgrade because they will not be able to differentiate themselves or answer customer needs without it.

“But this is not just about customer acquisition or retention,” he adds. “You need to start laying the foundation to monetize the growth segment of traffic. We’ve integrated service- and control-rich functions into the ASR, sitting at the IP edge, to tune the network behavior. Our 7600 router – there are 80,000 deployed worldwide, 10,000 to 15,000 in mobile – offers gateway and other functions, as well as modular addition of services and subscribers.”

Across mobile network architectures, from device to cell site, backhaul, IP edge and IP core, “you see points that have to be addressed because the network was designed for voice. For data, you can’t just add T1s and E1s,” he says. While Carrier Ethernet and Psueudowire in the backhaul segment are expanding how much traffic hits the IP edge, operators also must devise coverage and device strategies with mixes of Wi-Fi, femtocell and fixed and wireless backhaul.

In the near term, Cisco and other arms dealers are supplying 3G mobile broadband operators with data technologies that work in tandem with continuing circuit-based infrastructure. But with operators, including Verizon Wireless, Clearwire and others, promising to introduce LTE and other all-IP 4G infrastructure this year, the real break with circuits is coming into view.

In developing strategies for that new world, Cisco is employing and recommending a focus on three primary guiding issues.

First, operators must guide their development of mobile IP network intelligence with scalability constantly in mind. The most effective next-gen network technologies will provide controls of network functions like rate shaping and billing and will do so at the local or regional network edge, thereby avoiding hard-to-scale architectures built on either too burdened centralized intelligence or too distributed, and thereby costly, device intelligence.

Second is the goal of creating user experiences that are more visual, integrated and ubiquitous. “You’re seeing Webex on the iPhone or Blackberry, with people sharing presentations,” Nagesh says. “On the consumer side, you may be watching CNBC on TV, then take it to your train commute on your mobile phone, then to work on your PC. Seamlessness of experience is somewhat ingrained in user expectations. With IP, you can do this.”

The third guiding issue lies with operators building and selling to both consumers and content partners the personalization capabilities that can be enabled only by network intelligence. “There are many applications that personalize in ways that know who you are, where you are, how much should be buffered and the like. Most of this is intelligence on network,” says Nagesh.

Intelligent network value also may be husbanded to win a share of revenues from over-the-top Web content and applications. “If the consumer goes to Flickr.com, the operator doesn’t even know. So how do you make it smarter so you can still personalize?” he asks. “An operator can go from zip code and show a targeted ad while complying with privacy and, in the process, get a piece of the action from advertising that they’re not getting today. If you’re a fast car connoisseur, delivering an ad for that would be more meaningful to you. We’re working with providers to do this because the network understands real-time behavior than cannot be known from a device or backend server.

“In mobile, with all the applications going to IP,” Nagesh assert, “Cisco is more relevant to mobile service providers than ever.”

0

Freedom from Protection Worries Builds Momentum for Cable DTAs

By
charlie
Posted in: Premises Devices & Networking, Service Providers

Dave Clark, director, product strategy and management for cable set-tops, Cisco Systems

Dave Clark, director, product strategy and management for cable set-tops, Cisco Systems

April 20, 2009 – The use of digital terminal adapters (DTAs) as a means of bandwidth reclamation in cable is gaining momentum, thanks in part to an undisclosed deal negotiated with programmers that is said to obviate the need for protecting basic service content, at least for now.

As previously reported (September, p. 1), digital delivery of analog basic service tiers to DTAs has raised a question of whether such content could be protected without incurring the costs of employing the removable set-top security mechanism required by the FCC. While such content has not been secured in analog mode, rendering it digitally makes it more valuable to pirates, which raised a question of whether license holders would require protection.

Last summer several vendors competed to provide Comcast the light security that was deemed necessary to pass licensing muster in the DTA delivery mode. Sources said the MSO chose a “light” version of Motorola’s Privacy Mode encryption system with the intention of opening the market to other set-top suppliers by eventually going to the SCTE 52 data encryption standard, also known as Cipher Block Chaining.

Cable operators felt they had a case for using software-based security that could run on the low-cost DTA microprocessor without use of dedicated decryption hardware, thereby avoiding the need for removable security. But there was no assurance this interpretation of the rules would fly at the FCC, which caused a lot of hesitation about DTAs among other MSOs. Moreover, equipping headends to support a simpler form of encryption than digital systems now use added expense to the whole proposition.

Meanwhile, sources say, Comcast was quietly exploring the possibility of winning dispensation from programmers that would permit the MSO to transmit the content digitally in the clear. These sources say an agreement was reached at the start of the year that will allow transmission of the analog basic tier digitally without use of content protection for a two-year period.

“Comcast had decided to go with a software-based version of Motorola’s Privacy Mode, but now that won’t be necessary,” says an executive involved with the security issue, speaking on background. “This has lifted a big cloud of uncertainty on the DTA strategy, which is now drawing wider interest among MSOs.”

Comcast, now rolling out DTAs in a handful of markets, is discovering strong market receptivity, with a large share of analog customers installing the devices themselves. In a video interview carried by Multichannel News, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told industry analyst Leslie Ellis these experiences have confirmed his company’s plans to reclaim anywhere from 45 to 80 or possibly more analog channels across all its cable systems over the next 12 to 24 months.

“It went a lot smoother than I dreamed it would,” Werner said of the initial DTA rollout in Portland, Ore. “I’m more optimistic about the prospects for DTAs now than I was six months or a year ago.”

Among the various strategies under consideration as near-term solutions for gaining more bandwidth for HDTV and dedicated “unicast” services, including switched digital video and installation of 1 gigaHertz amplifiers, the DTA approach results in the biggest spectrum gain, Werner said. Plus, with over 70 percent of Comcast’s customer base already taking digital service, equipping the remainder of the market with DTAs to eliminate the analog bandwidth “was an obvious choice for us,” he said.

Speaking during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February Comcast COO Steve Burke said the company was gearing up to introduce DTAs in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. While upfront costs outweigh immediate returns, he said, the longer term benefits associated with lowered service theft, operational efficiencies and the opportunity to up sell customers to new digital services should be “accretive” to the bottom line.

Comcast initially tapped Thomson, Pace Micro Technology and Motorola as its DTA suppliers. Cisco Systems is also hoping to capture DTA business, notes Dave Clark, director of product strategy and management for cable set-tops at Cisco.

“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest in DTAs and a tremendous strategic debate on DTAs as well,” Clark says. “We have a lot of people testing the DTAs. Who will deploy them and where is still a matter of debate.”

The DTA effect is being felt elsewhere as well. Canadian supplier Vecima Networks, which had been poised to introduce a switched digital video solution as an adjunct to its universal edge QAMs (quadrature amplitude modulators) if the market demand was there, has put SDV on hold, says Richard Blenkinsop, vice president of marketing and product development at Vecima.

“We’re not hearing a lot of buzz around SDV the way there was a year or two ago,” Blenkinsop asserts. “The feeling is that analog reclamation [through use of DTAs] delivers the biggest improvement in bandwidth efficiency.” As reported elsewhere (p. 14), Vecima has responded to the growing move toward all-digital transmission in cable with development of a digital-to-analog plant-mounted module that can provide support for serving all analog customers in MDUs without requiring installation of DTAs at each TV set.

But there is still strong resistance to the DTA option in some quarters. While the strategy delivers big bandwidth gains, it doesn’t move the industry toward the intelligent edge-based switching paradigm that SDV supports and which many feel is the wave of the future, totally apart from bandwidth reclamation issues. “At the end of the day, if you deploy DTAs everywhere, you’re still looking at having to go to a switched architecture,” says an MSO engineer, speaking on background. “And there’s no migration path for a DTA. When people upgrade to digital, the DTAs are junk.”

Werner, however, made clear Comcast doesn’t see the choice of the DTA as an either/or option next to switching. “You will see us doing a lot of switching in the future, because that’s the natural evolution of our industry,” he said. “But I think there will be more MSOs going to DTAs as well.”

0

Complexities of Cable PCTV Agenda Portend Disruption on Many Fronts

By
charlie
Posted in: Consumer Services, Service Providers

Jeffrey Bewkes, chairman & CEO, Time Warner

Jeffrey Bewkes, chairman & CEO, Time Warner

April 13, 2009 – What began as the cable industry’s attempt to mount a coordinated response to growing consumer demand for access to TV programming on the PC has morphed into a complex open-ended agenda with major implications for business models and technology platforms alike.

Public statements by senior MSO and programming executives at the industry’s recent National Show in Washington, DC revealed there is broad concurrence on the need to create a new approach to providing content online that satisfies consumers while protecting existing revenue streams. But unpublicized details of the uncertainties surrounding approaches to advertising, content distribution, security and pricing strategies suggested it could take longer to achieve a cable TV-to-PC service than many players expect.

For example, a senior industry executive confided there may well be three areas of technology advancement that will require new initiatives on the part of CableLabs, including a new version of the broadband DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications) standard (see accompanying story). New approaches to content protection and aggregation might also be on the CableLabs docket before long, he said.

In general, programmers appearing at the National Show voiced support for the idea of offering their content to cable subscribers as a more complete reflection of their full lineups than they offer on the Web today. Acknowledging their experiments with Internet content are works in progress that have not generated significant new revenues, they made clear their desire to protect existing TV-centric revenue models, including the $25-billion revenue stream generated through cable subscription fees

Comcast, with its OnDemand Online initiative, and Time Warner, pushing TV Everywhere from the programming side, are spearheading negotiations among cable operators and programmers to determine what the business and operations models would be for such services. At the National Show Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeffrey Bewkes announced Time Warner was forging ahead with launch of HBO Go, which HBO subscribers will be able to access through their cable providers’ Web sites.

“We’re all being too slow,” Bewkes said. “We should put up all our networks on the Internet, out on broadband right now, get it out on home screens, broadband screens, put it on the Hulus and YouTubes, but only if people are subscribing to the video plant.” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts echoed the theme at another session, contending that, for programmers, a cooperative arrangement with cable on broadband distribution of content represents “a new opportunity to try to monetize in this horrific advertising environment.”

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, appearing on a panel with Bewkes, concurred with him on the need to do a better job monetizing Web-delivered content. “Nobody is making any real money from the Web except search,” Murdoch said. “We have to monetize it.” Dauman, while noting that agreement on a cable TV-to-PC business model was a greater challenge for ad-supported cable networks than it was for pay TV services like HBO and Showtime, said he thought operators and programmers could find a “middle ground” that would protect both sides’ interests.

Some press reports suggested Robert Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Co. voiced opposition to the TV-to-PC monetization concept when he said that “preventing people from watching any shows online unless they subscriber to some multichannel service…would be something we would find difficult to embrace.” But, in fact, Iger was only stating the obvious, which is that programmers will not endorse a complete ban on free access to selective offerings of programming such as Disney provides through its various online outlets.

When it comes to full access to the complete programming lineup, which is what the discussion is really about, Iger was as supportive as others. “With authentication (of subscribers) in place, streaming full networks online would be an interesting and potentially compelling feature for consumers, and we are certainly open to exploring that possibility,” he said.

How to accommodate authentication is one of many issues that MSOs and programmers are working on in hopes of making services like OnDemand Online a reality before the year is out, said Marty Roberts, vice president of marketing at thePlatform, Comcast’s Web publishing arm. As the supplier of portal support services for Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Cablevision as well as Web publishing services for many programmers, the company is playing a key role in working through various operational challenges for the industry as a whole, Roberts noted in an interview.

“No one is locked down on a strategy,” Roberts said, noting that decisions remain to be made on whether the broadband content will be offered free as part of cable TV subscriptions or at a premium and whether people will be given the opportunity to subscribe to a broadband-only cable TV programming package. While MSOs and programmers are negotiating with each other on a one-to-one basis with regard to licensing, usage policies, advertising and all the other core business issues, Roberts said, they are coordinating strategies as much as possible, especially when it comes to technical issues.

“The whole story leaped into public view six months earlier than we expected,” he said. “So there’s still a lot to work out in the way of business models, technology issues, licensing models, other things.”

But thePlatform has been on the case with Comcast for some time, which gives everyone a head start as they confront the many issues. “We’re discussing a lot of the underpinnings that we’ve been working on for OnDemand Online with the rest of the industry as well,” Roberts said. “The goal is to achieve a broad solution that will work across multiple MSOs and programmers.”

It’s a complicated task, made more so by the fact that the goal is to offer programming in a la carte on-demand mode rather than simply to stream it linearly as a replication of the cable TV channels. “Mostly we’re talking about non-linear distribution,” Roberts said. “It’s yet to be determined whether programming will be offered live [as broadcast] as well.”

On-demand availability of virtually all of cable TV programming over broadband would replicate the Web user experience, thereby meeting consumer expectations for entertainment in the Internet domain. But it would bring with it new requirements for the supporting distribution infrastructure and for advertising, where dynamic ad placements replacing the original live broadcast ad placements would be required for monetization in the new Web-centric mode.

“From an advertising perspective, linearly delivered programming would be easier to deal with, because you could leverage the existing transport infrastructure,” said Joe Matarese, vice president and general manager of on-demand strategies at Arris. “On demand requires a different infrastructure for making ads available and for placing them.”

Media delivery servers must have “multi-protocol capabilities on a converged delivery platform,” Matarese said. And it “probably makes no sense to use MPEG-2 transport,” owing to the need for descriptors to support new modes of ad placement. While the SCTE 130 standard, which sets specifications for identifying what ads to place and where to place them, is “completely leverageable,” other aspects of the advertising architecture for this new service “are likely to be different from the protocols we’ve been looking at.”

But, from the perspective of the broadband world, such capabilities are now a given for advertising, Roberts noted. “The ideal in terms of addressable advertising, telescoping, interactivity is already happening in broadband video today,” he said. “It’s second nature to us. Our job is to explain to the MSOs how this works and to explore with them what the optimal strategy will be.

“One of the advantages of our system is that you can set up different types of ad policies to a pretty complex degree,” he continued. “For example, you can have a policy that says 80 percent of the ad space in a given program gets filled by one entity and the other 20 percent by another, and if the party with the 80 percent control doesn’t have an ad to deliver, the request goes out to the other party’s server.”

“Nothing has been decided” with respect to advertising business models, Roberts added. “At thePlatform we’re thinking ahead to handle situations where there are different sources of ads with various failover scenarios.”

Indeed, Roberts noted, its thePlatform’s job to be thinking ahead on several fronts even though so much remains to be determined at the negotiations level. “We have a good working solution that we could deploy tomorrow,” he said, “but it’s important to over time that we build a better foundation to how it works.”

Authentication and interfaces to billing systems are already a component of the digital store module which thePlatform supplies to process orders for pay-per-view content offered by InDemand through Comcast’s Fancast and Time Warner Cable’s RoadRunner portals. Enhancements to those processes are a big focus of the new initiative.

Here again uncertainties abound on basic strategy. For example, some operators want to confine access to programming through their own portals while others want to follow a syndication model that allows people to get limited-access content from programmers’ sites as well. The latter case would require an authentication model analogous to the federated ID strategy employed in social networking under the OpenSocial and other models (see January ScreenPlays, pp. 1 %26 36), where the same identity code is used wherever someone needs to be authenticated for access to content.

Some operators are even talking about promotional hooks, such as offering a free weekend with a coupon. And everyone is trying to figure out how to accommodate subscribers’ access to content when they’re beyond their cable operator’s footprint. If access to restricted content requires authentication based on the modem ID every time a user requests a show in order to ensure the user isn’t just sharing their ID with friends and neighbors, it would be difficult to provide a service that is literally “TV Everywhere.” So some thought is being given to requiring just a periodic authentication of the user with the modem on the assumption that, if the user has been accessing content on the modem and then isn’t on the modem the person is probably traveling and should be trusted based on recent usage patterns.

“Whatever the model turns out to be, it’s just an evolution of our existing system,” Roberts said.

Another area of uncertainty concerns how content will be secured and what the means of conveying usage policies will be. “We’ll start with stream encryption and then add DRM (digital rights management) over time,” Roberts said. Historically, he added, the only DRM thePlatform supported was the one used with Microsoft’s Windows Media, but now there’s a need to embrace next-generation systems that facilitate policy enforcement and protection across multiple devices.

For example, the platform adopted by the Marlin consortium provides a Common Domain approach to content protection, where encryption keys can be moved about among any number of devices assigned to a user’s domain. In contrast, the protection mode known as Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP (DTCP-IP) was designed to limit authorization of usage a particular piece of content on just one device beyond the PC in order to assure content owners they would be able to generate new revenues with multiple device usage.

CableLabs, which has endorsed DTCP-IP in consort with the home networking consortium known as DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), may become involved in defining a new protection model for the TV-to-PC service, possibly by proposing extensions to DTCP-IP, noted the executive cited earlier, who spoke on background. However, he said, changing the standard to suit cable operators’ agendas or adopting another such as Marlin might prove problematic with programmers.

Another big area of concern in the shaping of the industry’s new TV-to-PC agenda is the degree of coordination that will be required in establishing a supporting network infrastructure for the aggregation and distribution of content in high-quality mode that avoids the quality issues imposed by the public Internet. “This is another area for CableLabs to look into,” the executive said. “You need a centralized point for storage and a means of distribution to local storage that maximizes efficiency and quality. There are a lot of technical details that have to be agreed to as well as business aspects in terms of how costs are shared.”

Indeed, Roberts noted, without reference to any role for CableLabs, the “four 9s” performance that thePlatform has always maintained in supporting Web-based content publishing and distribution is “nowhere good enough” for what the cable industry has in mind. “We need to carrier class,” he said. “Video on demand has to stay up with carrier class reliability and economics to make sure ads always show up and to deliver the experience people are accustomed to with cable programming.”

As for the local access side of the network, the potential demand for a high volume of video content raises question about the utility of the cable industry’s local broadband architecture as its currently constituted. Even the new DOCSIS 3.0 platform with channel bonding and the choice of what is known as I-CMTS (Integrated Cable Modem Termination System) and M-CMTS (Modular CMTS) for positioning of RF QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) capabilities inside or external to the CMTS does not fully address cost issues associated with delivering a high volume of IP-based cable programming, the senior industry executive noted.

“The CMTS was not designed to transmit what amounts to an IPTV programming service,” he said. “Some people are talking about leveraging the modular option, bypassing the CMTS altogether by encapsulating IP content in DOCSIS 3.0 frames at the edge QAM. Others are talking about changes in the architecture of the CMTS itself. This could become a project for CableLabs.”

The scope and complexities of the ambitious TV-to-PC undertaking suggest there is much more to the agenda than leaders have discussed so far – possibly more than they’ve yet considered. If the goals, including new standards and centralized on-demand distribution architecture for IP-based programming, are met, will the industry be content to operate this service as a separate domain parallel to and replicating much of the next-generation time-shifted and advertising capabilities now being developed for the existing cable TV MPEG-2 based infrastructure?

“It’s hard to imagine creating something this immense and powerful and then trying to do the same thing in the TV realm,” said another senior industry executive, speaking on background. “What may really happen is you’ve got an immediate demand-driven need for an IPTV architecture that everyone wants to put in place as quickly as possible. Once that’s done, everyone is probably going to stand back, look at what they’ve built and realize they now have the next-generation service architecture they need to move ahead on the TV front. A lot of people don’t want to admit it, but this is our way of migrating to IPTV.”

0

Cable IPTV Push Sparks Interest In Refinements to DOCSIS 3.0

By
charlie
Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

John Holobinko, VP marketing, BigBand Networks

John Holobinko, VP marketing, BigBand Networks

April 13, 2009 – Does the cable industry need still another version of DOCSIS?

Debate is intensifying in cable circles over how best to accommodate distribution of growing volumes of video content over DOCSIS channels, with some players insisting there’s a cheaper way to go through adjustments in CMTS architecture and others contending IP video needs to be treated independently of the CMTS as part of the video service portfolio under control of edge-based intelligence.

Adding to the confusion, some stakeholders say there’s no need for any changes at all because the costs of CMTS downstream modules are falling rapidly and will continue to do so as ever more next-generation modules are deployed. But, while this is true, it begs the question of whether other approaches might prove even more cost effective, especially if the industry settles on a unified approach to optimizing DOCSIS for IPTV.

Thus, the question is, will CableLabs step in to develop still another version of DOCSIS, perhaps an extension of the new 3.0 version rather than a completely new version, or will the issues be left to the market to resolve? A senior executive in a position to know says the issue is on the table in discussions among CableLabs members, but there’s been no decision to launch a new initiative.

Making the case for an edge-based approach that avoids use of the CMTS, BigBand Networks recently introduced the vIP Pass platform (see March ScreenPlays, p. 8), which puts DOCSIS “wrappers” on IP video streams so that the streams can be delivered through DOCSIS 3.0 modems to end users. The strategy isn’t simply a matter of bypassing the CMTS, says John Holobinko, BigBand’s vice president of marketing. Rather, it’s about putting IP video on the same operational plane as other video services in order to establish a uniform approach to handling all types of video, regardless of which devices are accessing the content.

“The big challenge facing operators today is to be able to treat video content as a single asset,” Holobinko says. “Why reinvent the wheel by treating IPTV as a separate silo? The mechanisms you need to process this content already exist on the video side of the equation. You can treat it as just another data plane.”

Holobinko asserts this sort of extension of the applicability of edge intelligence is the biggest argument for installing the switched digital video (SDV) technology BigBand pioneered as a bandwidth-saving mechanism. Now serving some 22 million cable households, the BigBand SDV technology has positioned operators to continually expand on use of intelligence to support next-generation services, he notes.

“There are a number of ways besides SDV to grow bandwidth, but SDV puts you in a position to evolve toward switched unicast and more personalized services, including advanced advertising,” Holobinko says. “It gives you the capability to grow in steps.”

But there’s strong resistance to the CMTS bypass case on the part of companies like Cisco Systems that are pushing the envelope on DOCSIS technology. Where a year ago Cisco was demonstrating 88 downstream channels per chassis on its CMTS, it will achieve 500 downstreams by year’s end, says Ben Bekele, a marketing manager for the company. Challenged by MSOs at the end of 2007 to reach ten times the capacity on its CMTS at a tenth the cost, the company hit the cost target but exceeded the capacity goal by a factor of three, Bekele says.

Bekele also argues the DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS-based approach to delivering IP video allows operators to flexibly leverage combinations of unicast and multicast delivery mechanisms in conjunction with use of bonded and non-bonded channels as conditions require. While the industry’s TV-to-PC programming agenda presently leans toward delivery of content in on-demand mode rather than linearly, the availability of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) multicasting as a function within the DOCSIS framework could be important to future IPTV configurations.

But, of course, SDV is built on the use of multicasting in the non-IP traditional digital TV broadcast mode, which presumably would be how IP video traffic would be handled through the edge-based architecture. Which way an operator chooses to go in setting up IPTV distribution may well depend on whether the company is already pursuing SDV or has chosen another approach to bandwidth conservation, such as Comcast has done with its move to reclaim most of the analog bandwidth on its networks through use of low-cost DTA (digital terminal adapter) set-tops to convert digital to analog signals in analog households.

Harmonic, which won a CableLabs innovation award for its Direct-2-Edge IPTV solution in 2007, has quietly moved the product to preparations for commercial deployment, notes Nimrod Ben-Natan, vice president of product marketing, solutions and strategy at Harmonic. “We’ll be announcing a major deployment of the technology soon,” he says.

But Harmonic has not made a big deal out of the platform, he adds, because the company recognizes it’s not the end-all solution for the industry as a whole. “It’s a great tool, a very cost-effective way to deploy IP-based video services,” he says. “But I’d be lying to you if were to tell you the CMTS market is standing still. In some cases people will prefer Direct-2-Edge, and in others they’ll stay with the CMTS approach.”

Ben-Natan notes that two and a half years ago CableLabs produced a controversial document in which the costs of the CMTS were cited as a key factor arguing for migration to all-fiber networks in order to cost-effectively achieve the level of broadband capacity that would be required to operate in IP mode over time (see ScreenPlays November 2006, p. 1). With CMTS and QAM prices now a fraction of what they were then, operators remain committed to using DOCSIS to support broadband capacity, he says.

Moreover, if CableLabs were to move toward new DOCSIS specifications, there would be a simple way to cut costs even farther than has been achieved with the decoupling of the downstream and upstream channel cards in the CMTS, which is intrinsic to DOCSIS 3.0. “You can break up functionalities that presently are integrated into one box to better capture cost benefits,” Ben-Natan says.

Building on the modular CMTS model, where QAMs are positioned at the network edge rather than in the CMTS, the industry could exploit the high processing intelligence in today’s off-the-shelf terabit routers to create DOCIS-optimized units to handle CMTS functionalities in central locations. High-density QAM modules such as envisioned in Harmonic’s HectoQAM roadmap would allow a single high-capacity router port to serve multiple RF channels at the edge.

Arris, too, has put together a DOCSIS CMTS bypass solution for IPTV, leveraging work done earlier by C-COR and nCube, two companies now folded into the Arris portfolio, but the company is not actively promoting the solution. “It would be relatively trivial for us to resurrect that environment and get it deployed if we see a demand for it,” says Joe Matarese, vice president and general manager of on-demand strategies at Arris.

“From a back-office standpoint, we really don’t care what approach is taken,” Materese says. “But it would probably be easier for operators to support IPTV on the I-CMTS platform.”

Taking a more modular approach involves integration of session management and policy management capabilities, which Arris is well equipped to do within its own platform or with other vendors, he adds. But serving the needs of an IPTV service might require more complicated interfaces than are presently supported within CableLabs’ PacketCable Multimedia specifications.

“Whatever architecture you decide on there are probably some tweaks that need to be made to support a real IPTV service,” notes the unnamed executive who was referenced earlier. “The industry needs to decide which way it wants to go and optimize the architecture accordingly. That’s where CableLabs comes in.”

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