Service Providers Archive

Hosted SDV Solution Puts Tech In Play for Tier 2, 3 Cable Ops

Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

Joseph Nucara, co-founder & CEO, Adara

June 3, 2011 – Smaller cable operators may soon find it’s easier than once seemed possible to escape the capacity and technology constraints that have put them at a competitive disadvantage over the past few years.

Canadian operator Cable Cable, an Ontario based rural provider with 4,200 subscribers, says it has been able to cost effectively deploy a uniquely hosted and managed switched digital video (SDV) platform to support a 100-channel HDTV lineup, with the result that its digital subscriber base has expanded four fold over the past two years. The new, low-cost approach to SDV is offered as a service by Toronto-based Adara Technologies utilizing a comprehensive SDV solution supplied by Cisco Systems that can run on legacy Motorola-equipped cable systems as well as Cisco/Scientific-Atlanta systems.

Cable Cable executives credit Adara for their “phenomenal success” at building the business on a network which two years ago could only accommodate 25 HD channels. “Prior to launching with Adara, we had no way of making the critical improvements to our service offering,” says Tony Fiorini, president and owner of Cable Cable. “Our video service now rivals that of the largest Tier 1 operators in metro areas in North America, and we easily have the best product available in our area.”

As Cable Cable general manager Michael Fiorini notes, “Normally, SDV is a complicated technology to deploy and operate for a small operator.” Consequently, many smaller operators looking to expand capacity to meet the HD competition from satellite and other providers often turn to the analog reclamation strategy made popular by Comcast. This eliminates most of the capacity-consuming analog channels on the network while utilizing digital terminal adaptors (DTAs) to translate digital signals to analog for subscribers who want to remain on an analog service.

“We are so glad that we didn’t pursue analog reclamation using DTAs,” Michael Fiorini says. “That alone would have cost us millions of dollars with a lot of pain and customer disruption over, at least, a two-year rollout.” In contrast, he adds, the Adara SDV solution “cost us a small fraction of that, and we were live in four months.”

Other operators appear to be picking up on the Cable Cable success story. Adara co-founder and CEO Joseph Nucara says the company is in discussions with about 100 cable companies across North America, ranging from very small operators with as few as 1,000 customers to fairly big ones with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

As described by Nucara, the Adara solution addresses two major pain points for operators: capacity limitations on delivering enough HD content to compete with satellite and technical barriers to getting premium content to all types of Internet-connected devices. “The HD challenge is what’s on people’s minds right now,” Nucara says. “The IP question is on the horizon.”

There’s another issue that the hosted approach addresses as well, which is a cost-effective way to provide VOD service. Adara employs Cisco’s Content Delivery System and Ericsson’s OpenStream back office to provide a highly scalable and efficient distributed architecture to support both traditional and IP-based on-demand services, Nucara notes.

“Several of our customers haven’t deployed VOD,” he says. “We provide a very full solution that breaks with the historical cost paradigm. We drop a Cisco integrated streamer vault in at the headend and the whole system can be managed by our backend.”

In all the use cases supported by Adara, the core advantage is the engineering and operations savings that accrue from a centrally managed hosted approach to service migration, he adds. “We’ve assembled an engineering and operations team with deep experience in all aspects of digital video,” he says. “By centralizing and sharing that talent across our customer base we’re providing the Tier 1-level support that’s been the missing piece for Tier 2, 3 and 4 operators.”

Depending on specific requirements, Adara develops, installs, integrates and provides long-term network management services for advanced SDV, VOD and IP solutions. At the same time, by centralizing as many of the technology components as possible, the company lowers the capital cost burdens of implementing these solutions locally.

In the case of SDV Adara provides the digital control system and applications servers that run the locally installed universal session resource managers, SDV QAMs (quadrature amplitude modulators) and SDV client software on Cisco 4600 and 8600 set-tops. “What we have provided on a hosted basis is capable of handling millions of subscribers across hundreds or thousands of cable systems,” Nucara says.

In the typical implementation of the hosted SDV model an operator might have a 550 MHz plant offering a combination of analog and digital SD channels, where the SD channels are delivered through 256 QAMs controlled by a legacy digital Motorola or Cisco headend video processing and conditional access system. All it takes to simulcast the entire lineup in HD is to free up eight 6 MHz channels for installation of the Cisco SDV QAMs, Nucara says.

This architecture supports a seamless viewing experience, notwithstanding the distance between the hosted and local operating component, he adds. “When the subscriber tunes into an SDV channel, all the components are talking to each other, so that, even if the channel isn’t there on the QAM, the acquisition occurs in milliseconds,” he says. “To the subscriber, there’s no difference between switching channels on broadcast and SDV.”

There’s no need to change out any elements of the legacy system, because the hosted SDV system operates independently with its own encryption, QAMs and set-tops. Owing to the long-standing cable tradition that says once you’re with a given supplier you’re locked in to that supplier’s solutions, operators sometimes have a hard time accepting they can implement the Cisco SDV solution on a Motorola plant, Nucara notes.

“Even after we’ve presented our strategy they’ll sometimes come back to us and say, ‘I like the idea, but we’re a Motorola shop,’” he says. Often, he adds, smaller operators don’t have access to the SDV solution offered by their legacy suppliers simply because neither Cisco nor Motorola is willing to allocate support and integration service resources to small systems.

Nucara argues that the hosted SDV solution has multiple advantages over analog reclamation as a means of freeing up capacity for HDTV, starting with the costs. On a non-recurring cap ex basis, the expenditure to equip a 4,000-subscriber plant with the Adara SDV solution comes to about $186,000, whereas the whole DTA-based solution, counting the boxes, installation costs and headend gear, would cost about $1.25 million.

Of course, with the SDV solution, the initial costs don’t include the set-tops, but those are installed on a pay-as-you-go basis as subscribers opt for the HD service tier, Nucara notes. “With SDV you’re getting an immediate 500 percent capacity gain on whatever segment of the service you’re simulcasting for HDTV, which allows you to begin offering a full HD channel lineup from the start,” he says.

“With analog reclamation you have to wait until you’ve installed all the DTAs before you get the capacity boost, and then you’re only getting a capacity increase of 50 to 125 percent, depending on how many analog channels you’ve reclaimed,” he adds. “So you can be paying ten times as much for one tenth the capacity gain compared to SDV.”

One of the capacity-expanding strategies operators contemplate is use of MPEG-4 compression, but, as a standalone solution, it has not been widely adopted owing to costs and the fact that capacity gains are limited by the number of channels that can be allocated to whatever tier is created to drive MPEG-4 set-top penetration. For example, if eight channels are allocated to MPEG-4, the capacity gain on those channels is about two fold, which is a small percentage of overall channel capacity in comparison to what can be accomplished via SDV simulcasting.

However, MPEG-4 is an important tool for increasing the capacity gains on the Cisco SDV system deployed by Adara. “The system is codec aware so that if it recognizes an MPEG-4 set-top is tuning to a channel that is available in MPEG-4, it will deliver that channel,” Nucara says. On the other hand, he adds, if the MPEG-4 set-top is tuning into a channel that’s already in play that happens to be running over MPEG-2 it will tune to that channel even if the same program is available in MPEG-4 so as to avoid activating a new bandwidth-consuming stream.

The fact that the Cisco set-tops are IP-enabled means that operators installing the 4600 or 8600 to support the SDV-delivered HDTV service are also creating a footprint for IP service delivery. This is facilitated by the fact that Cisco’s RTM middleware supports a next-generation navigation system that provides users access to all service categories whether delivered in IP over DOCSIS or via legacy MPEG transport streams, Nucara notes. “The middleware is downloadable to the set-tops,” he says.

The Java-based middleware provides a developer-friendly applications environment that Adara is now exploiting to foster implementation of IP services by its customers. “We’re beginning to leverage the DOCSIS 2.0 connections in the set-tops for incremental apps like widgets and a special over-the-top button on the user interface,” Nucara says. Initial implementations of Web-based services on the Adara system will be announced this fall, he adds.

Case for SP CDNs Builds as Tech Gives IP Players New Advantages

Fred

Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

Duncan Potter, CMO, Edgeware

May 20, 2011 – Privately controlled video-optimized content delivery networks are becoming more vital than ever to premium TV providers, thanks to advances that are driving down multi-device formatting and functionality costs for managed and unmanaged on-demand services.

One bellwether to the growing appeal of privately controlled CDN-type architectures to network operators and over-the-top providers alike is the sales pace at Edgeware, a supplier of distributed video delivery network systems which saw its business grow by 130 percent in 2010. While cable and telco service providers remain Edgeware’s core target sectors, a surge in OTT players seeking to deliver high-quality video to TVs and other devices is having a big impact on Edgeware as well, notes CMO Duncan Potter.

“Two years ago our business was almost purely IPTV driven,” he says, in reference to the early adopters who leveraged Edgeware’s IP video streaming architecture to cut the costs of implementing VOD. “In 2010 35 percent of our business came from the over-the-top side, and, as of Q1 this year, it’s at 45 percent.”

But Edgeware’s business is also growing rapidly on the service provider side with recent wins that include Telecom Austria, Telecom Slovania and an expansion of its engagement with The Netherlands’ KPN. “All of a sudden we’re talking to a lot of potential service provider customers about when rather than whether they want to deploy our technology,” Potter says.

Edgeware’s high-density solid-state servers employ flash memory in combination with a hardware-implemented data plane, allowing operators to distribute edge caching points with support for advanced functionalities across the network. “No matter what your legacy service base is, once you’ve gotten distribution into IP mode, you have huge flexibility to slot in our technology wherever you need it,” he says.

The Edgeware server allows operators to deliver IPTV or cable services over managed networks together with Web TV and HTTP adaptive streaming-based services over unmanaged networks with the help of tools that facilitate session and bandwidth management as well as monetization through advertising and wholesale service offerings. The platform supports fast-channel change and the addition of features such as start-over, pause on live TV, integrated multicast-to-unicast conversion and network PVR.

Video-optimized CDNs in general have gained considerable appeal with the formatting efficiencies made possible by software encoding system supplier Envivio, Duncan notes. “They’ve developed a protocol based on open standards for segmenting the steps in multi-device encoding, which allows the different parts to talk to each other across the network,” he says. “It allows distributors to scale really fast and big with formatting segments sitting further and further out in the network.”

As described by Envivio officials, the firm’s Genesis universal mezzanine format eliminates the need to deliver multiple streams supporting multiple bit rates in any given streaming format from headends and other encoding centers to the network edges. Because each output profile only differs from others by a few small parameters, the platform can deliver all the video processing information for multiple bit rates, metadata and other information together with a single H.264 stream from the master encoder.

This architecture achieves the bandwidth savings that come with delivering a single stream over the network while avoiding the quality loss and costs incurred with transcoding at the edge, notes Bob Stockwell, director of marketing and communications at Envivio. “We’re sending profiles to the edge and telling the processors what bit rates to deliver without introducing another generation of loss,” he says. This approach cuts over 50 percent of the bandwidth that would be used if all the streams for a given set of adaptive streaming profiles were delivered from the central encoding point, he adds.

The crucial endpoints in this new architecture are the Envivio 4Caster headend encoder and the edge-based Halo Network Media Processor (NMP), which the firm introduced last month after several months of testing in various service provider networks. The new approach has already caught the attention of cable operators, Stockwell notes. “We now have two cable MSOs employing the architecture to deliver over-the-top content to their customers,” he says.

With Halo NMPs in place an operator can send a single master stream with up to ten format profiles with bit rates suited to streaming HD, SD and variations of those resolutions to all types of devices, Stockwell says. The profiling information is delivered with the encoded content in the universally interoperable MPEG Transport Stream container format, which overcomes the incompatibility between broadcast transport and HTTP streaming that has prevented efficient deployment of multi-screen services alongside legacy TV service. Now, he says, all the established monitoring, forward error correction and stream protection workflows can be brought into the information conveyed along with the bit-rate profiles.

This gives service providers the opportunity to operate in the multi-device world in ways that are responsive to how things work in the new environment, he adds. “Content providers can’t think that they define the user experience anymore,” he says. “The device does. The guys who will win are the ones who understand what it takes to serve an under-25 generation of users with no plans to buy TV sets. It can’t be a fear-driven response that just focuses on getting service out to iPads or to turn iPads into glorified remote controls.”

Along with providing a means of supporting live broadcasts to multiple devices the Genesis architecture can be used in conjunction with CDNs to streamline delivery of on-demand content in the multi-screen domain. Sezmi, which began as a U.S.-based provider of hybrid over-the-air pay TV and over-the-top video, has now become a global provider with a more flexible approach that relies on the Envivio encoding system to support multi-device services, says Sezmi CMO David Allred.

“We’ve built out our workflow and integrated their technology with ours,” Allred says. “We can bring in live video and encode, encrypt and distribute it live or to our CDNs for delivery to any device. We control the middleware, front- and back-office systems and all the multi-screen components for getting service to iPhones, iPads, Androids, etc. What we’re saying around the world is let us drop our platform in place and you can launch a revenue-generating hybrid service very quickly. It’s a very appealing proposition in emerging markets.”

Sezmi has embraced multiple approaches to supporting hybrid services where the source of content complementing OTT might be DTT (digital terrestrial television), satellite or even IPTV over a PON (passive optical network) infrastructure. “We started out with a DTT-plus-broadband model, but we learned that around the world not everybody is delivering TV services via DTT,” Allred says.

“In the Middle East we had an opportunity to bundle satellite offerings with OTT,” he adds. “In Malaysia we’re working with a DVB-based system, and in Mexico we’re bundling OTT with live multicast IPTV delivered over PON.” In the last case, the contract is with broadcaster Grupo Salinas, which is also engaging Sezmi for hybrid service delivery with its direct-to-air and Web-subscription business units.

The opportunity is huge given the percentages of people who are not subscribing to pay TV services in some markets. “In many markets outside the U.S. 60 percent of users are taking free over-the-air TV and the rest are buying very expensive satellite service,” Allred says. “That’s why the notion of the hybrid model has become very effective in a lot of emerging economies.”

Domestically Sezmi has altered its original broadcast station-centric approach owing to broadcasters’ reluctance to devote available spectrum to delivering pay TV services. “Our basic business model now is to license our technology with a professional services component and some recurring cost element based on subscriber growth,” he says. The company is negotiating with unnamed ISPs that may use Sezmi’s system to launch OTT subscription services that could extend nationwide.

How big a threat the use of platforms like Sezmi’s in conjunction with advanced streaming and CDN architectures will become to established service providers could depend on how aggressively the operators embrace the new IP distribution capabilities. Indeed, says Edgeware’s Potter, the flexibility of the Edgeware platform to scale IP distribution capacity as needed opens an opportunity for service providers to generate wholesale revenue from OTT suppliers while cutting the costs of providing backhaul support for broadband streams.

“The backhaul costs are enormous for big telcos,” Potter says. “Those costs will be reduced if you can place a lot of the content at the edge and scale the transcoding infrastructure by abstracting more encoding pieces to the edge.”

And there’s a revenue side to it as well. In one analysis for a European telco factoring in the savings in backhaul costs and any revenue benefits from creating a CDN architecture, Edgeware assumed the operator would be able to sell CDN services to just ten percent of the OTT content providers using the network. “We then asked how long it would take to get to ROI on the CDN investment,” Potter says. “The answer was three and a half months.”

In another interesting variation on how service providers might make profitable use of the Edgeware platform, KPN, after building out the Edgeware VDN infrastructure to support its IPTV services, determined it wanted to offer an unmanaged OTT service on a separate VDN infrastructure. “They didn’t need the full capacity of our 20 gigabyte product all the time, but they needed to accommodate peak usage periods for soccer games and other popular events,” Potter says.

“We sold a license for regular five gig usage on the 20-gig product and charge them for the higher levels on a usage basis,” he adds. “This way they can cost justify the CDN while avoiding having to cap the number of tickets sold for a Saturday soccer match.”

With microcharging for event purchases online and much else via cell phones now commonplace as a replacement to the use of credit cards in Europe, the need for support for “very peaking behavior” is well established in the international market. “It will be interesting to see what happens here in the U.S. as service providers take advantage of OTT delivery to compete effectively,” Potter says.

Post-DOCSIS ‘Dumb-Pipe’ Option May Emerge Sooner than Expected

Fred

Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

John Dahlquist, VP, marketing, Aurora Networks

May 11, 2011 – Cable operators’ interest in a move beyond DOCSIS that would support delivery of all-IP services over a Gigabit Ethernet stream has reached a point where at least one supplier, Aurora Networks, is considering introduction of the enabling technology in advance of any formal specifications from CableLabs.

The industry is “looking at what people are calling advanced MAC and PHY [for media access control and physical layer], which is about how they could take Ethernet to the home,” says John Dahlquist, vice president of marketing at Aurora Networks. “Whenever you go through the standardization process it takes a long time, so we’re actually looking at doing something in parallel but trying to stay up with CableLabs as fast as we can.”

Any such discussions underway at CableLabs remain under wraps. Spokesman Mike Schwartz would only say, “It’s not for public consumption at this point.”

As reported last year (March, p. 18), the case for exploiting commodity-priced GigE technology to deliver IP services has gained traction with the cable industry’s embrace of IP as the future conduit for subscription TV services. But it remains to be seen how readily operators will jump to a whole new architecture, given the ongoing focus on migration to IP via the bonded-channel DOCSIS 3.0 platform.

“In the long run it’s easy to speculate things will get faster and simpler, but the details are far from clear,” says Jim Chiddix, former Time Warner Cable CTO and a strategist who sits on the boards of several industry entities, including Virgin Media in the U.K. and U.S.-based technology supplier ARRIS. “There’s no reason the cable plant can’t support gigabit Ethernet when operators decide the time is right for the market. But there’s complexity and investment involved in delivering it, and the question is what’s going to pay for that next step.”

But there’s no denying the appeal of the “dumb-pipe” approach. “DOCSIS was designed to address issues in a totally different network environment where you had to make things conform to performance requirements with relatively low capacity and long reach,” Dahlquist notes.

“There were a lot of issues pertaining to avoiding delays on the roundtrip from the headend to cable modems and back,” he adds. “Today, with deeper fiber penetration and more bandwidth assigned to IP, it’s turning into a high-capacity, short-distance service environment. So there are other ways of doing it now.”

Timing and transition costs aside, a move beyond DOCSIS seems likely at some point, Chiddix suggests. “I’d have to guess in broad strokes that in ten or 15 years people will be getting Gigabit Ethernet kinds of services to their homes simply because Gigabit Ethernet is cheap,” he notes.

“It’s a ton of bandwidth bi-directionally,” he adds. “All the infrastructure and the equipment and so forth is very well understood and thoroughly commoditized. If you’ve got Cat 5 running around your house, you can go to Radio Shack and for thirty-five bucks you can get a Gigabit Ethernet switch and have that kind of speed two-way all around the house.”

But the momentum behind DOCSIS 3.0 shouldn’t be underestimated, he advises. “CMTSs (cable modem termination systems) are getting much bigger and much more dense. There’s a long way for DOCSIS 3 to go in terms of density and cost before it runs out of steam.”

Still, given the great variety of plant conditions and operational strategies across the cable industry, the fact that GigE offers an attractive, low-cost alternative to DOCSIS transport suggests there may be many situations where operators would opt to go this direction if a solution were available, even if there were no set standard for such an architecture on the HFC plant.

This is where Aurora’s focus would be in developing a solution, Dahlquist says. For Aurora it’s not a big stretch, given the firm some time back offered an Ethernet solution for HFC it called “BitCoax.” Introduced as a potential product in mid 2008, BitCoax was designed to provide operators a two-way Ethernet transport at 400 megabits-per-second in each direction using the RF spectrum on the coaxial plant above 1 GHz.

Such a solution would require that fiber be extended well into the network, in so-called “fiber-deep” configurations, so as to shorten the coaxial transport distances to where the Ethernet signals could survive the attenuation that inhibits use of the higher frequencies on today’s cable plant. Given the dearth of fiber-deep configurations, “we were ahead of our time with BitCoax,” Dahlquist acknowledges.

But with the industry now focused on migrating TV services to IP, which will require finding enough bandwidth to simulcast IP content with legacy MPEG-2 TV, the issue becomes how to use the freed up bandwidth with maximum efficiency, wherever it’s found either within the existing spectrum range or above. BitCoax was designed to allow cable operators to leverage their current HFC architecture to deliver new services without costly changes to their back office provisioning and operating systems.

Having achieved that OSS integration, Aurora is well positioned to develop a “BitCoax 2 type of product,” Dahlquist says. The idea would be to tap into some of the bandwidth operators would in any event be allocating to IPTV below 1 GHz and to leverage some of the bandwidth above, which will become more readily usable as operators drive fiber deeper to accommodate the surging requirements for unicast on-demand capacity.

There’s definitely been an increase in momentum toward deeper fiber penetration, Dahlquist notes. “One of the things we use as a leading indicator is the fact that our design backlog is up about 20 percent over last year,” he says. “The percentage is greater than that in terms of the number of designs, but the number of households represented by these projects is up about 20 percent. And the percentage of our designs that are fiber deep is increasing. These account for about twice as many projects as we’re seeing with segmented nodes.”

Significantly, this trend is based on demand for more bandwidth for current operations, where there’s a need for more VOD and HD capacity. “We’re probably one step removed from seeing the impact that will come with the migration to IPTV,” Dahlquist says

One of the technical strengths Aurora brings to the Gigabit Ethernet concept is the ability to deliver Ethernet in TDM (time division multiplexed) mode, a skill it developed in conjunction with producing a cellular backhaul solution for cable operators which is now in wide deployment. Operating a subscription video service over a gigabit Ethernet flow will require some means of tightly controlling performance parameters, which is what TDM is designed to do.

“What we’re looking at doing is resurrecting a TDM product that we’d run just over 1 GHz as far as center frequency goes, utilizing the same [RF] path for forward and downstream over coax,” Dahlquist says.

Aurora’s cellular backhaul solution for cable plant employs T1/E1 circuit emulation that allows operators to use Gigabit Ethernet transport over fiber to deliver signals through the legacy PDH (Packet Digital Hierarchy) T1/E1 connections of the cellular base stations and base station controllers. As a solution certified to be compliant with the Metro Ethernet Forum’s MEF 18 specification, the Aurora TDM-over-packet technology had to overcome limitations of traditional “pseudo-wire” solutions by assuring the jitter, wander, frame loss and packet delay metrics on a per-link and aggregate backhaul network basis are well within tolerance levels set for all generations of GSM, CDMA and WiMAX networks.

Such capabilities, along with synchronization of clock timing to coordinate performance across all end points, could offer cable operators a way to maintain rigorous performance requirements in the IPTV domain. In cellular operations such synchronization must extend across hundreds or even thousands of base stations connected to any one controller.

How close such thinking is to what’s taking shape behind the scenes in the advanced MAC and PHY discussions at CableLabs remains to be seen. Any MAC specification that emerges for the new architecture would serve as the interface between the data pipe and everything else to ensure that the specific quality-of-service parameters attending each type of service are maintained across the distribution network. The new MAC would have to “talk” to the traditional DOCSIS MAC, MPEG MACs and other data protocols and translate them into commands at the Ethernet MAC layer.

All the intelligence associated with user authentication, billing, operations support, usage policies, functioning of applications, advertising placements, security, etc. could be handled in the IP domain, allowing operators to position intelligence in support of such operations wherever they wish. These controls would all be passed transparently through the system to communicate with network and premises devices.

“We would incorporate as much of what’s taking shape [at CableLabs] as we can but go out there and see if the market isn’t ready for this type of product,” Dahlquist says. “We were ahead of ourselves with BitCoax because a couple of years ago people were tied up trying to implement DOCSIS 3.0, and we were trying to get mindshare for something radical. Maybe now it won’t seem so radical.”

Despite Broadband Slowdown Growth Opportunities Abound

Fred

Posted in: Consumer Services, Service Providers

Jonathan Hurd, director, Altman Vilandrie & Co.

May 9, 2011 – With the broadband gravy train slowing to a crawl, tier 2 and 3 network operators can take heart from service innovations underway across the country that suggest there’s plenty of growth opportunity for those who are flexible enough to break new ground.

According to Pew Research, in 2010 the rate of growth for new broadband subscribers slowed dramatically, with penetration increasing only three points from 63 percent in 2009 to 66 percent by midsummer last year. In its study Pew found that only one in ten of the non-Internet users expressed an interest in going online in the future. Almost half (48 percent) cited lack of relevant content as a barrier, while six in ten would require assistance in using computers.

But while it’s clear that broadband is a maturing market, it’s just as clear that operators are discovering new ways to drive revenues, thanks in part to the way vendors are enabling cost-effective approaches to delivering TV-quality video services over their broadband pipes and in part to new demand for value-added services in vertical markets. Moreover, many operators are finding it makes sense to put new low-cost fiber options to use in extending their reach beyond traditional service boundaries.

For example, even where competition is intense, operators are finding that by enhancing infrastructure with fiber to the premises they can offer a higher quality service that makes a difference, especially among people with more money to spend. SureWest, which serves suburban areas of Sacramento, Calif. and Kansas City, Mo. markets, is a case in point.

“SureWest has chosen not to chase customers who are only interested in finding the lowest price and who churn at higher rates than customers who are more concerned with the value they are getting,” says Anne Chacon, manager of corporate communications at SureWest. “We have had to be more aggressive with our promotions recently as a result of the market and competition. But for us, the old saying is true, ‘It’s more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.’”

According to Jonathan Hurd of Altman Vilandrie & Company, his company’s research indicates that quality of video matters a lot to consumers. “We found that 18-34 year olds – the age range that most frequently watches video over the Internet – are most likely to be bothered by lower-quality video. There’s an opportunity for providers of managed video services to emphasize quality in order to appeal to these consumers.”

The research also found that the more a customer pays for monthly subscription services, the more he or she values quality. Thus, providing a high-quality and reliable signal is a competitive advantage, particularly against over-the-top video services, for attracting and retaining the higher-ARPU subscribers.

In fact, reports Gary Schultz, president of Management Research Group, one of MRG’s clients recently achieved a 50 percent reduction in churn by implementing technology on its IPTV system that allows the operator to proactively identify and repair quality issues.

High definition and DVR set-tops are now a given of the subscription TV service. But there’s plenty of upside to be gained with a move to whole-home DVR and even 3DTV. Hurd says his firm’s research confirms the growth potential for operators who make a commitment to delivering 3DTV.

“Of the respondents who had seen 3D movies or video in the past year, 75 percent agreed that it is a better experience than 2D,” he says. “And more than half plan to purchase a 3D-capable TV in the next 3 years.”

But for service providers who are offering traditional TV services over legacy IPTV, analog and MPEG-2 infrastructure as well as for those who are not, it’s within the IP broadband service stream that the greatest growth opportunities can be found, notwithstanding the falloff in sheer penetration growth. On the entertainment side, the upside stems from the fact that vendors are now offering software and premises gateway products that offer operators great flexibility to enhance their service portfolios at much lower costs than has been the case with traditional approaches to subscription TV.

For example, the new all-fiber network built by Fibrant, the municipally owned provider in Salisbury, North Carolina, has switched out a legacy IPTV platform in favor of the blended services platform offered by Minerva Networks. Fibrant’s new TV services include high-definition broadcast television (HDTV), whole-home digital video recording (WHDVR), video-on-demand (VOD) and Internet TV, says Len Clark, manager of sales and marketing for the City of Salisbury.

Fibrant’s strategy, like that of many other small-market operators, is all about “the future of data, voice and video services delivered over an open, IP-based infrastructure,” Clark says. The company plans to leverage the software platform in combination with its fiber infrastructure to offer online education services, digital signage and remote healthcare.

New home gateways are contributing to the flexibility essential to adding IP-based TV services that can reach any device in the home as well as lower the costs of whole-home DVR by eliminating the need for costly set-tops at every TV in the home. For example, GTC Broadband in Granby, Mo. is deploying media hubs and IPTV receivers from Entone to expand its service portfolio to include whole-home DVR and to enable easy access to personal media and popular Web content and services from a single user interface. These include video on demand (VOD) from Vudu, music streaming from Pandora, photo sharing from FlickR and Picasa, social media from Facebook and Twitter, and other Web applications.

“In order to differentiate ourselves and to maintain our market leading position, we needed a reliable and future-proof solution,” says Bryan Johnson, technology engineer at GTC Broadband. “Entone’s devices allow us to quickly and effectively deploy a compelling video service while also providing our subscribers with an enhanced and integrated TV experience.”

Of course, little things can make a difference as well, as was apparent from responses to a survey of small operators conducted by Viodi, a supplier of consulting and video support services in the tier 2 and 3 market. Paul Bunyan Telephone, for example, reported it developed its own iPhone app for surfing its content offering, thereby overcoming the limitations its legacy TV navigation system imposes on users’ access to all options in the carrier’s catalog.

One rural company, instead of spending to upgrade its system to support digital TV, created an affordable analog package, which, at $26 per month provides customers access to all the TV stations in the region. The idea of standing pat with analog TV and using the broadband stream to support premium service delivery in over-the-top mode is now catching on, thanks to the versatility of software platforms like Minerva’s that are designed to support a wide range of hybrid service models in conjunction with hybrid premises devices.

Smaller rural operators have been using the benefits of fiber to consolidate operations for years. In many cases, these fiber routes pass through markets outside an operator’s existing exchange or franchise boundaries. Expansion into these adjacent markets is an opportunity for the operator to increase their customer base, while giving residents of these communities expanded choice.

Some operators are now using an edge-out wireless strategy. The approach starts with fixed wireless and then, as justified by customer additions, last-mile fiber infrastructure replaces the fixed wireless connections, which can be redeployed to new markets.

Indiana independent Smithville is finding success building a fiber-to-the-premise network in the Bloomington area. Already the largest independent telecommunications provider in Indiana, Smithville and its subsidiary Smithville Digital is roughly doubling the size of its addressable market through a fiber-build, edge-out strategy.

In addition to serving businesses and multi-dwelling units, Smithville is finding new applications such as telemedicine that play to its traditional strengths as an operator able to meet the stringent reliability and security requirements of the public switched network. Cullen McCarty, executive vice president of Smithville Digital, notes that while the state’s population is 33 percent rural, only 13 percent of the state’s doctors reside in those areas.“Using fiber-based connectivity on the Indiana Digital Gateway from Smithville Digital, Bloomington Hospital has brought lifesaving cancer treatment to rural areas of southern Indiana,” McCarty says.

Smithville is also breaking ground in another niche that could work for smaller operators – video conferencing centers with telepresence capabilities. The company has created a conferencing center with a state-of-the-art 16-by-5 foot HD screen for local businesses to use.

An operator might have to dig a bit to find such opportunities, but it’s worth the effort. For instance, one operator tells Viodi it picked up a hospital campus for its video product when the city-funded channel was shuttered. Another operator provides a bulletin board for a community college as a managed service.

Operators are also discovering their ability to offer TV channels can help win commercial services customers. In these cases a business TV package is offered as part of the deal with channels devoted to financial and general news and possibly other topics. And there are opportunities for customizing the package, as in the case where an operator managing a hospital’s internal network adds a local “Health Minute” component that allows doctors from the hospital to offer health tips as part of the operator’s local channel programming.

This leads to the idea of being the outsourced IT expert for small businesses. Many operators sell and repair PCs today. The local operator is often the most technologically savvy business in the community and is used to providing 24/7 secure service, so extending the relationship to include IT services is not a stretch.

Along these lines, video surveillance is in an area that seems like a natural for operators. Many report they are getting into these services, both as turnkey integrators as well as service providers.

Security system vendor Comporium estimates that security industry sales were over $28 Billion with three million systems installed in 2009. One operator exploiting this demand is Massilon Cable TV. The cable company, which serves 47,000 customers in central Ohio, last year signed up for Comporium’s Security Dealer Program to deliver the firm’s uControl solution, a single-device based platform that supports alarm system, communications gateway and home automation functionalities.

“We are always on the lookout for complementary services for our customers,” says Massillon Cable TV president Bob Gessner. “In the near future, security monitoring will grow to encompass a variety of futuristic services that we want to deliver to our customers.”

The future of broadband is about leveraging the links now in place to deliver a virtually unlimited range of advanced services. It may not be as easy as simply selling more broadband connections, but initiatives along these lines will secure the future for operators in markets where the only other service recourse is big national providers who have no links to the local market.

Issues Cloud Wireless Spectrum Goals

charlie

Posted in: Lead Story, Regulation & Finance, Service Providers

Greg Whiteaker, principal, Bennet & Bennet

March 28, 2011 – With calls for more wireless spectrum echoing from the White House to K Street, the prospects for action in Washington seem certain. But, in truth, the issues to be resolved to get anywhere near the 500 MHz targeted by President Barak Obama and the FCC portend a long, hard slog for regulators trying to forge a plan that will fairly satisfy the needs of competing interests.

Incumbent participants in cellular say the principle that should drive all decisions is a no-brainer: Spectrum is “the lifeblood” of the wireless industry. That’s the term the presidents of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and CTIA-The Wireless Association have been using over the past several months as they lobby the federal government for more spectrum.

But, for the FCC, adjudicating what’s fair will require sorting through a mind-boggling matrix of uncertainties attending the relative commercial values to be accorded various spectrum segments, the degree to which technological advances can mitigate widely anticipated demands for ever more spectrum from the cellular providers and the merits of demands for spectrum emanating from a growing queue of non-cellular players.

To cite just one example of the complexities involved, if TV stations are forced to relinquish some of their spectrum so it can be refarmed for broadband services, that change will affect their ability to offer mobile video services. And, assuming that’s done, how much weight should be accorded claims for spectrum from new entrants like EchoStar, whose spectrum stockpiling – both at auction and through company acquisitions – could enable a broadband service that competes for both fixed and mobile customers?

“At some point, the DBS guys are going to have to figure out strategically how they’re going to deal with a cable and telco bundled package that, over time, is going to present them with a huge problem when all they have is video,” says one analyst, speaking privately.

In his February 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined plans – dubbed the “National Wireless Initiative” – to free up 500 MHz of spectrum for broadband services that eventually would serve at least 98 percent of Americans. One year ago, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan recommended the same amount: 500 MHz of new spectrum within 10 years, including 300 MHz within five years.

The goal is extremely ambitious, because to pull it off, the government would have to nearly double the 593 MHz it has licensed so far over the decades. “This is a very aggressive timeline because this type of reallocation typically takes a much longer time,” says Greg Whiteaker, principal at Bennet & Bennet, a law firm specializing in telecom.

In an effort to get things moving, the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) has identified 115 MHz for what it calls “fast-track evaluation.” This would include bands adjacent to or near the current Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) bands, which is primarily used by T-Mobile for its broadband wireless service.

But even that proposal is burdened by the disconnect that often occurs between what regulators can free up and what the industry prefers to use.

“Most of the wireless industry would prefer spectrum in between the AWS and PCS (Personal Communications Services) bands because of its harmonization internationally,” Whiteaker says.

Bands in Play

Several big blocks of spectrum could become available over the next five years. They could include Clearwire’s enormous holdings at 2.5 GHz if the company’s financial situation prompts a fire sale or acquisition. (For an analysis of that possibility, see “Is There a Cable Upside in a Clearwire Collapse?” in the November 2010 ScreenPlays.)

Besides Clearwire’s holdings, arguably the next most coveted chunk is the Upper 700 MHz D block. But that’s one of the biggest cans of worms to be opened in the spectrum debate.

“The FCC National Broadband Plan recommended conducting the auction and allowing commercial licensees to partner with public safety entities to deploy a nationwide dual use commercial/public safety broadband network using the D block and the adjacent Public Safety 700 MHz allocation,” Whiteaker says. “The public safety community, however, wants Congress to change the law and award the D block to public safety for use in a nationwide public safety network. The White House recently endorsed this, and several bills have been introduced to give the D block to public safety.”

The timing could give public safety an edge.

“You’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and lawmakers would love to get a bill through to use the D block somehow,” says David Kaut, associate analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “One of the things about the D block is that if you give it to public safety, that creates a $3-billion [auction revenue] hole.”

Obama and other backers of the National Wireless Initiative are selling their proposal partly on the assumption that its “voluntary incentive auctions” will raise $27.8 billion over the next decade. Roughly $10 billion of those proceeds would go toward paying down the deficit.

Some telecom executives say privately that when they meet with members of Congress and other federal officials, they make their case for additional spectrum partly on the grounds that operators are ready, willing and able to spend tens of billions in the short term on new infrastructure and jobs. In other words, they’re selling spectrum refarming as a shovel-ready stimulus project, an economic boost that would be in addition to whatever auctions rake in.

Interestingly, even if public safety got the D Block spectrum, commercial
operators might not necessarily be locked out of that band. “There is concern that public safety entities might just turn around and lease their spectrum to AT&T or Verizon Wireless anyway, furthering the looming mobile duopoly,” Whiteaker says.

The AWS bands represent another 60 MHz of spectrum. And, as Whiteaker notes, “the FCC also is working on ways to make Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) spectrum more used and useful, specifically, to potentially make it more available for terrestrial use.”

Projecting Spectrum Deficits

All of the plans and lobbying assume that there’s currently not enough spectrum to keep up with trends in data usage. For example, the GSM Association cites a 2009 Arthur D. Little Survey that says high-usage countries such as the United States could need up to 1,161 MHz of new spectrum.

Many such predictions are based on Cisco System’s tracking of the market. Over the past year, global wireless traffic increased 160 percent to 90 petabytes per month, Cisco says.Bell Labs, citing its own research, says that by 2015 there will be 30 times more smartphones per square kilometer in urban areas than there were in 2010.

Of course, with the coming of 4G, surging video consumption on such devices will add another multiplier to the calculations on bandwidth use. And innovators keep coming up with new compelling applications that will add even more pressure on available capacity.

For example, Panasonic in January announced a portable High Definition Visual Communications System (Mobile HDVC) for use in medical diagnostics that will be offered over the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Mobile Broadband network. The mobile HDVC system delivers high-definition visuals with MPEG4-AVC technology and features 360-degree full duplex stereo sound quality, stable connectivity with QoS, and rate control forward error correction.

But for all the concerns about future bandwidth needs for cellular, some industry veterans say it’s important to factor in technology advances when considering the projected spectrum needs.

Indeed, the increasing bandwidth consumption as measured by Cisco and others has not depended on increases in spectrum allocations, notes Michael Marcus, director of Marcus Spectrum Solutions, a consultancy. “Most of it has come from technical improvements and more intensive infrastructure.”

Marcus cites a chapter from telecom history that’s playing out again today. In the 1980s, the private land mobile radio industry lobbied to start using TV spectrum to accommodate growing usage.

“You notice some analogs between how the sky was falling in the early 1980s and how the sky is falling today,” Marcus says. “The land mobile people never got any more spectrum, but they found ways to use their spectrum more efficiently.”

A new development at Alcatel-Lucent coming on line over the next three years represents one possibility along these lines. As reported in the February issue (p. 8), the firm says its new modular lightRadio architecture, representing a radical departure from the long-standing Radio Access Network architecture, will allow operators to double access network capacity within existing spectrum allocations while reducing the cost per bit by 50 percent.

“All Spectrum is not Created Equal”

A big part of what makes spectrum allocation so difficult is that not all bands are equally viable from a business or technological perspective. For example, the 700 MHz band is attractive partly because of physics: the lower the frequency, the farther a signal travels. Those propagation characteristics mean that fewer base stations are required to blanket a market, thus reducing the operator’s CapEx and OpEx.

But a relatively low frequency position by itself doesn’t make a band ideal for broadband or video. If that were the case, service providers would be clamoring to use 420-440 MHz and 450-470 MHz. Under HR 607, the Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011, those two chunks – currently used for amateur radio – would be auctioned off.

Instead, a band’s attractiveness also depends on how many other countries in a region or worldwide also have allocated that spectrum for telecom use. The more operators use a particular band, the bigger its volumes of infrastructure and other equipment. That translates into greater vendor competition, driving down the prices that operators pay for equipment.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we need internationally harmonized spectrum,” says Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, a trade association representing the region’s operators that use the GSM-LTE family of technologies. “All spectrum is not created equal. It doesn’t need to be globally harmonized, but it has to be at least regionally harmonized.”

That’s because owners of oddball spectrum historically have paid a price premium for their gear, a cost that hurts their ability to price their devices and services competitively yet profitably.

“For example, in the 700 MHz band, there is a band class of equipment that will
work on the Upper 700 MHz C Block spectrum licensed to Verizon Wireless, and a band class of equipment that will work on the Lower 700 MHz B and C blocks, which is primarily, but not exclusively held by AT&T,” says Bennet & Bennet’s Whiteaker. “There will be equipment that operates in each of these bands, but not across both bands. Small providers that hold the lower 700 MHz A block spectrum may find it difficult to get equipment that is interoperable with the other bands.”

But some industry veterans say that oddball spectrum isn’t the millstone that it once was.

“The equipment business isn’t what it used to be,” says consultant Michael Marcus. “Now you have a bunch of hungry people in Asia with lots of capabilities. Who knows if some of them might be willing to do something that Motorola or Nokia wasn’t willing to do? The cost of making odd equipment in modest quantities may not be as extreme as it was five years ago.”

Marcus bases that analysis partly on his experience with a company that wanted to use a technology in the AWS band that wouldn’t work anywhere else in the world. Although that plan failed, the custom-technology requirement wasn’t the reason.

“That tells you something: that there are people out there who are willing to make somewhat offbeat electronics at plausible prices,” Marcus says.

Yet another factor is how the newfound spectrum is spread around the band – or bands.

“All of this refarming presents an interesting technological challenge,” says Charles Riggle, vice president of marketing and business development at SkyCross, which makes antenna systems for smartphones and other mobile devices. “In the case of a lot of the former TV spectrum, it may be disparate chunks spread around the UHF bands.”

That kind of allocation can increase a device’s cost, such as by requiring sophisticated antenna systems and transceivers to hop from chunk to chunk. If so, that premium could make it difficult for a new service to do its part for bringing broadband to 98 percent of the population, particularly to price-sensitive demographics.

Use It or Lose It — Maybe

Because there’s a finite supply of spectrum, the FCC often attaches buildout requirements to licenses: make service available to a certain number of people or places by a certain time, or the spectrum is forfeited. In theory, that stipulation should discourage companies from buying spectrum and then letting it lie fallow, such as to keep it out of a competitor’s hands or as a bet that it can be resold later for a hefty profit.

But that’s not always how it works in practice.

“The FCC sometimes gives licensees additional time to meet obligations,” Whiteaker says. “For example, the FCC extended the original construction deadlines for 700 MHz licensees, [such as the] Verizon 4G system, because that spectrum was reclaimed from the broadcasters and the transition to DTV was delayed.”

It’s also possible to meet the requirements by launching service only in a handful of densely populated areas, a strategy that helps fuel the debate over rural-urban digital divide. That’s what some Personal Communications Services (PCS) licensees did years ago.

“A licensee could meet the requirement by providing signal coverage to 33 percent of the population of its licensed area within five years and to 66 percent of the population of its licensed area within 10 years,” Whiteaker says. “That means that a licensee could build out in the more densely populated areas and leave a lot of area unserved.

“The FCC recently has imposed some buildout obligations on a geographic basis with a ‘keep what you serve’ type licensing system. In theory, this will afford some additional spectrum opportunities down the road.”

Others argue that spectrum forfeiture is a mostly hollow threat.

“My experience is that the FCC has never held anyone’s toes to the fire on buildout,” Marcus says. “There’s so many loopholes, and there are so many ways to pull scams.”

In some cases, the FCC doesn’t even set stringent requirements.

“For AWS, there wasn’t much at all,” one telecom executive says privately. “Why? The FCC at the time decided not to do them.”

That executive argues that charges of spectrum hoarding are misplaced: “AT&T and Verizon have plans to use AWS. It just happened that there was a 700 MHz auction closely after the AWS [auction], so they got that and prioritized that. They’re definitely going to be using AWS.”

Buildout requirements or not, other forces often dissuade companies from letting spectrum lie fallow.

“When MBAs look at corporate books and assets that aren’t producing income, they get upset,” Marcus says. “As my economist friends say, the cost of the money is a more effective pressure to build than the government making vague threats. Money is tight these days. I think it’s going to be hard for anyone to raise significant amounts of money to buy spectrum and let it lie fallow. Who wants to give you money that doesn’t produce any income? The capital markets might be the determining issue.”

New Ways to Manage IP Streams Offer Bandwidth Gains on HFC

charlie

Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

Amit Eshet, senior director, media processing, BigBand Networks

March 25, 2011 – BigBand Networks last month demonstrated a new approach to minimizing the bandwidth impact of IP video streams that goes well beyond adaptive streaming to help lower MSOs’ costs of introducing IPTV services.

With IP stream counts escalating as video-capable devices proliferate, the providers of access bandwidth, including telcos and mobile operators as well as cable companies, need new ways to minimize the impact, says Amit Eshet, BigBand’s senior director of media processing. “Adaptive streaming (AS) is a good option today, but it’s not good enough for future needs,” Eshet says.

IP data of all descriptions is delivered in unicast mode over the Internet, including video. AS, which adjusts the bit rate of a video stream accessed by a user based on device requirements and how much bandwidth is available, has come into play as a way to maintain a steady video stream as bandwidth fluctuates without causing buffering delays or undue losses in quality.

But AS is designed for unmanaged networks. With managed networks like cable’s in play to deliver IP video, new options are available, including multicast, the IP equivalent of broadcast, as well as unicast.

For operators, Eshet says, the solution entails making the network smart enough to leverage AS to greater advantage while also exploiting the bandwidth efficiencies associated with multicast, especially as the latter can be applied in conjunction with multiplexing the IP streams over QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) channels together with legacy MPEG-TS (transport streams).

“The spectrum dedicated to the delivery of video to set-top boxes can also be used for the delivery of video to IP devices in a ‘bandwidth-free’ manner that doesn’t degrade the legacy service or require massive capex investments up front,” he says. “The net benefit to the cable operator is a smoother and more cost effective migration to IPTV.”

Eshet makes clear the solution demonstrated at CableLabs’ Winter Conference in Atlanta is not yet a product. “We’re leveraging a technology concept that is part of BigBand’s advanced video processing capabilities, but it’s not a product today,” he says. “We’re working with customers to shape the solution to their needs, and then we will productize it.”

BigBand, of course, is not alone in putting new ideas on the table to help cable operators avoid big capex outlays for network upgrades as they move to IPTV services. While BigBand’s solution depends on the techniques it has developed for edge-based video processing that bypass the DOCSIS CMTS (cable modem termination system), CMTS vendors report they are likewise devising new approaches to managing IP streams that go beyond the capabilities built into the DOCSIS 3.0 specifications.

Indeed, Eshet acknowledges that some of the concepts posited by BigBand are doable through video processing positioned in the CMTS. But he cites additional efficiencies having to do with allowing IP streams to share MPEG transport channels. This can’t be done on the integrated CMTS platform but could be done with modular CMTS architecture, which leverages edge QAMs to handle modulation of the DOCSIS streams.

“Our point is that when you use intelligence at the edge QAM, you gain two things,” he says. One is the ability to apply video processing techniques that are used on legacy streams to the IP streams. The other entails leveraging existing QAM channels for video rather than allocating more QAMs for CMTS-delivered IP video. This avoids having to make sacrifices, such as cutting back analog channels or squeezing more digital channels into QAMs, to free up bandwidth for the CMTS, he says.

Advocates of the IP video-over-CMTS approach argue there are greater bandwidth savings to be found through delivering all IP-based services – voice, high-speed data and video – over bonded channels using the power of statistical multiplexing to get the most out of the allocated bandwidth. And they say this approach allows operators to make the transition to all-IP operations as the end game with a single point of management over all streams.

BigBand, in the CableLabs demo, showed how its approach could net at least 30 percent savings in bandwidth. Eshet says other techniques not part of the demo but part of BigBand’s evolving product strategy could add another ten to 20 percent to the savings.

The demo focused on how network intelligence can be applied to gain efficiency on unicast streams that employ AS. One benefit of the BigBand approach is to prevent IP device clients from demanding more bandwidth than they really need for a given session, which is often the case when the client-based native HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) AS process is in play.

This happens because the “chunks” or stream segments transmitted to a given client every few seconds depend on how much bandwidth the client tells the server it has available rather than on what the client actually needs. Thus, an AS rate plan that has a large-screen HD resolution such as 780p as its maximum level will provide bandwidth suited to that resolution to a device that has access to that much bandwidth even if the device is a handheld where 780p is overkill.

“Clients are greedy,” Eshet says. “They’ll try to get the highest bit rate possible with no awareness of what else is happening on the network.”

The upshot, as demonstrated at the CableLabs’ conference, is a lot of usable bandwidth gets wasted. In a setup where a household is entitled to 4 megabits-per-second service and three devices – a PC, iPad and iPod – are accessing that bandwidth simultaneously, “we showed you get only 70 percent utilization of the available bandwidth.”

Beyond wasting bandwidth on devices that don’t need what’s being sent, there are other aspects to AS the lead to this level of inefficiency. For example, AS is designed to work in pre-set bit-rate gradations, so that if an optimal bit rate isn’t available, the next level down might be lower than what’s really available.

Compounding the problem, when several devices asking for more bandwidth than is available to each are shifted to the next level down, the bandwidth freed up in that process could actually have been sufficient to provide at least one of them the bit rate it originally requested. All this is happening in multi-second intervals, which vary from one AS mode to the next, depending on which AS a particular device is compatible with.

Another problem has to do with inefficiencies resulting from the fluctuations in actual bit rates required for any given frame sequence in the video stream. A talking-heads sequence in a basketball game requires far less pictorial information to be transferred from one frame to the next than what’s needed to convey the action on the court.

These problems can all be addressed by network intelligence that looks at the whole bandwidth slice and divides it up moment by moment in whatever way is best suited to optimizing quality of experience across all devices. “We put that intelligence to use in allocating the bandwidth using several parameters, starting with making sure the amount of bandwidth used by any device is no more than is required for that platform,” Eshet says. “If an iPod and an iPad are in operation, you can get the same quality of experience on the two devices with much less bandwidth going to the iPod than you’re allocating to the iPad.”

Another technique exploits the advantages of operating in variable bit rate versus constant bit rate. The bit rate is adjusted frame by frame to deliver only what’s needed to satisfy the quality requirements for displaying whatever level of action is occurring in a given frame sequence.

By applying statistical multiplexing techniques, the bandwidth manager can then take advantage of capacity that’s freed up by those sessions where the action is diminished to make more bandwidth available to those devices that need it. “Basically we’re taking the same concept used for rate shaping of legacy video and applying it to AS,” Eshet says.

The demo showed these various techniques applied to the three session streams result in 100 percent utilization of available bandwidth, or, in other words, a net 30 percent gain in bandwidth efficiency, he notes. All of this can be done using existing AS clients and servers without introducing a proprietary AS, he adds.

“Our aim is to leverage the existing IP video infrastructure,” he says. “Instead of sending downstream IP video traffic through the CMTS, we’re suggesting it be sent directly to our MSP (Media Service Platform).”

This is BigBand’s frequency- and spectrum-agile edge-QAM device that employs the company’s Converged Video Exchange (CVEx) control plane software to manage advanced media processing for legacy broadcast, SDV and VOD as well as IP video. The modularly expandable MSP can also be configured to support local ad insertion and addressable advertising.

“On top of that, operators can employ BigBand’s edge resource and session managers to expand on the capabilities,” Eshet adds. Essentially there are three ways to use various combinations of these resources to conserve bandwidth, he says.

One is to perform all the bandwidth savings processes on the incoming AS video in conjunction with DOCSIS encapsulation at the edge, as was done in the demo. Another approach, which also requires DOCSIS encapsulation, avoids use of AS on the streams coming into the edge QAM, which allows unicast and multicast IP streams to be multiplexed with MPEG-TS over the core fiber network, and then applies AS along with the enhanced AS management techniques to the IP streams at the QAM so that they can be distributed in unicast mode to cable modems..

The third idea involves combining all the streams through the QAM but eliminating AS and DOCSIS encapsulation at the edge in order to maximize bandwidth efficiency across all streams all the way to subscribers’ premises. There the cable modem would capture the IP streams and apply AS for distribution to all devices in the home.

This last method would employ CVEx to tell the cable modem clients where to find the IP streams, much as it communicates to SDV clients to allow set-top boxes to identify SDV streams. This would require new processing and software capabilities in the cable modem. “We’re working with chip vendors and certain MSOs to define the client on the cable modem,” Eshet says.

This third approach can be combined with either of the others to create a hybrid architecture where AS is maintained end to end while the multicast and MPEG-TS streams are multiplexed together. “There are multiple ways to blend these approaches using edge network intelligence,” Eshet says. “Each customer can pick their own way.”

No Sign of Consensus In Cable IP Migration

charlie

Posted in: Lead Story, Navigation & Convergence, Service Providers

John Burke, SVP & GM, converged experiences, Motorola Mobility

March 21, 2011 – Notwithstanding some aggressive baby steps by Australia’s Telstra, Time Warner Cable and other MSOs in the direction of delivering live as well as on-demand cable content in IP mode, the industry’s progress toward IP TV promises to be a longer, harder slog than would be the case if there were greater consensus on key technology issues.

Most of the early efforts to formulate migration strategies are under wraps, but from discussions with vendors and other sources, it’s clear the question is no longer whether but how and when the transition from reliance on traditional MPEG transport to IP-based distribution of TV content will be made. Some, like Telstra and Time Warner Cable, are starting out with offering some IP TV services in parallel with legacy MPEG services, typically with the help of bonded DOCSIS 3.0 channels to accommodate the video streams.

In Telstra’s case, subscribers’ ability to receive the service depends on whether they purchase a “T-Box” hybrid set-top or connected TV or Blu-ray player licensed for use with the MSO’s “BigPond TV” service. TWC at this stage is relying on a native IP device, the iPad, to receive the service and has announced plans that include service delivery to TVs supplied by Samsung and Sony and a trial of IP TV service employing the Microsoft Mediaroom middleware for access over IP set-tops.

Comcast, now preparing for a trial slated to get underway by midyear, is taking a different approach tied to use of IP gateways for accessing pure IP TV linear and on-demand content. Liberty Global, on a somewhat faster track, plans to introduce all-IP services starting in The Netherlands later this year, then moving to Switzerland in early 2012 and other markets after that. Other MSOs will rely on new premises media gateways that will encapsulate legacy MPEG-2 TV content into IP streams for distribution to all devices, including low-cost IP set-tops, in the home.

Complicating things even farther, variations within each of these approaches from one MSO to the next make it impossible to deliver a one-size-fits-all solution even within, say, the pure IP-over-DOCSIS mode. Not only is there a debate over whether to use or bypass the CMTS (cable modem termination system) in such applications; there are important differences pertaining to whether key functions such as multicasting should be facilitated through use of PacketCable Multimedia servers or via the usual Internet HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) approach

“It’s not that we, as a vendor, can’t accommodate all these different strategies,” says one senior supplier executive, asking not to be named. “But the way things are unfolding is a significant departure from the cooperative spirit we’ve seen in the past, where new standards served to expedite deployments and keep costs down.”

Confusion over the best way to migrate to a converged IP service infrastructure, which most agree is the end game, is causing many MSOs to hang back in hopes of learning more from those who are plunging ahead. “We’re seeing RFPs from some big companies in North America and Europe, but far from the majority, and there’s even less activity in Asia and elsewhere,” the executive says.

But that’s not to say business isn’t picking up on the IP migration front. “Telstra is one of the first of many pay TV operators we’re working with around the world to bring a next-generation TV experience to customers,” says Marty Roberts, vice president of sales and marketing at thePlatform.

The Comcast-owned provider of online video publishing services has been a key player in accommodating cable operators’ transition to TV Everywhere with an initial focus on delivering Web-hosted on-demand premium content to PCs and other devices. Now thePlatform is putting its content management system to use in supporting distribution of linear as well as on-demand video to the TV.

“All the things we like about on demand [in the Web space] – near-infinite video libraries, advertising capabilities, dynamic guides for discovering content with integrated search and recommendations – are migrating back to the TV,” Roberts notes. A key challenge is that the IP linear and on-demand content has to be delivered at quality levels commensurate with traditional pay TV viewing.

“The goal is to provide a dynamic user experience with recommendations, content discovery and with a management layer that sits behind it that operates at a carrier-class level,” Roberts says. While Telstra is only delivering seven channels of linear news and sports programming in IP at this point, complementing a large portfolio of on-demand content, the operator is well positioned to add additional content to the linear IP stream over time.

That’s because “the management layer for all video is all in IP,” Roberts says. “The way the guide is presented, the way users are authenticated for playback, etc. – it’s all managed as a middleware layer that thePlatform operates for Telstra.”

The IP streams are directed at the transport level over the router-based Content Delivery System supplied by Cisco Systems, with interfaces to SeaChange International and Alcatel-Lucent servers as part of the CDN (content delivery network) infrastructure. Content protection on the IP side is provided by the digital rights management system supplied by Google’s newly acquired Widevine unit.

For households that want to augment their regular cable TV service with the IP-based service, Telstra is deploying the T-Box from Netgem, and it has deals with Samsung and LG Electronics to enable subscribers who buy those suppliers’ connected TVs to access the new service as well. A number of operators are opting for this type of strategy where the gateway set-top can accommodate IP and MPEG streams as two separate services while leveraging the efficiencies of an IP-based unified service management plane, Roberts says.

Indeed, this is what thePlatform had in mind when it designed its new mpx management system, he adds (see February 2010, p. 26). “We manage all the video independently,” he says. “The customer may have different windows for distribution with different restrictions on which devices can be targeted. They can model all the functionalities with enforcement of those rules on a per-subscriber basis at the time of playback. And they can personalize the experience for each user.”

Roberts adds: “Telstra is one of the operators we’ve been working with that is taking a very progressive approach by looking at best-in-class solutions up and down the entire technology stack.” The deal is “one of many we’ll be announcing over the next several months.”

Ironically, while this best-in-class modular approach frees MSOs from reliance on end-to-end turnkey solutions such as telcos used in earlier IPTV rollouts, it also frees the cable industry from reliance on a consensus-based solution. For traditional suppliers of cable network and customer premises solutions that puts a premium on software expertise as the key to driving new business.

Motorola Mobility is a case in point. “Our Medios suite of software solutions is very extensible, because not every service provider has the same strategy for how they want to deliver content in a multi-screen world, and not every service provider has the same business model driving their deployment,” says John Burke, senior vice president and general manager for converged experiences at Motorola Mobility.

“Some large service providers want to deliver everything in an IP format straight from the network to the device,” Burke says. “Other operators are looking to leverage devices like set-tops that are in the home and want to be able to move content from those set-tops, from those DVRs, to mobile devices as well. Medios provides a broad array of software tools to allow operators to address multi-screen opportunities as they see fit.”

One way around many of the uncertainties attending streaming of services in pure IP mode, not to mention the bandwidth issues imposed by simulcasting of the same content in IP that’s delivered over MPEG, is to deploy home gateways that convert the MPEG channels to IP in cases where a household is interested in an all-IP service. “We’re seeing several of our customers who have actually started deploying that approach,” Burke says.

“It’s an advantageous approach for the operator because it doesn’t require a wholesale replacement of their video infrastructure,” he adds. “When you bring your MPEG content as well as your IP content through this multi-tuner gateway, you can serve that content up as IP streams to very thin set-top devices or directly to these new Internet-enabled TVs and Blu-ray players.”

In some cases operators are looking on the use of IP distribution as a way to drive demand for new service tiers, such as multi-room service. “They’re using that to justify going into the house and putting in new set-tops that are MoCA enabled,” Burke notes. “But other operators are taking a more ubiquitous approach saying, ‘It’s more valuable to me to get a home network infrastructure deployed as quickly as possible,’ because they see the value that could bring to a whole host of converged experiences and applications they see coming down the pike.”

Liberty Global, which is relying on NDS as middleware supplier to gateways built by Samsung, is taking a more aggressive approach by delivering all TV services in IP mode to premium subscribers who opt for installation of media gateways (see November issue, p. 1). In an appearance at the European Cable Congress in Lucerne, Switzerland last month, Liberty CEO Michael Fries framed the MSO’s strategy as one that would be so feature rich it would dissuade subscribers from any interest in Google TV and other OTT options.

“We create a comprehensive multimedia centre for your home,” he said, as quoted by the European press. Critically, he added, Liberty is moving away from reliance on the walled garden as the exclusive source of content for its subscribers. “The new Horizon box is intended to change all this and open up Web content to the TV set as well as act as a hub in the home,” he said, noting that navigation across all service categories will be facilitated by the NDS Snowflake user interface platform.

In this migration strategy, the people who get the home gateway will be on a DOCSIS 3.0 bonded-channel feed that delivers all services over IP using MPEG-4 compression to conserve bandwidth. At the outset these will be premium subscribers, Fries said, but, eventually, the MSO intends to sign up new subscribers on the gateway-based IP service and at some point will be able to convert everyone to the all-IP service, eliminating the MPEG-2 flow altogether.

As quoted by Digital TV Europe, Fries made clear the economics of the advanced gateway approach are working in favor of this approach to IP migration. “In the end, you have to have a hard drive, advanced processing power in the device and an amazing user experience,” he told the publication. “There is only so much of that you are going to achieve in the cloud.”

Nonetheless, he added, “This isn’t costing meaningfully more than digital boxes did, say, two years ago. We’re not putting such an expensive device in the home that it’s going to blow our economics – that’s not the case at all. It’s an advanced device, but it will still be heavily reliant on our network – it will receive VOD content, it will source Web content; it will be upgradeable remotely.”

While officials haven’t discussed the way they’re going about allocating bandwidth to support IP simulcast, any MSO moving at this early stage to the full-service simulcast approach must deal with the limitations on channel bonding imposed by the current generation of cable modem microprocessors. While eight-channel bonding is available in the latest modems, four-channel bonding is the norm at this point.

But the total throughput available over four bonded channels, aggregating to about 160 mbps, may be sufficient to meet the bandwidth requirements for delivering all broadcast and on-demand narrowcast content to a limited number of subscribers. That’s because the IP mode of delivery allows operators to bring several techniques to bear in reducing bandwidth required for delivering all broadcast and on-demand content in comparison to the huge amount of spectrum required to support broadcast and narrowcast over MPEG-2 transport.

For starters, H.264 MPEG-4 compression reduces the per-stream bandwidth requirement by half. Through use of statistical multiplexing across all bonded channels and all DOCSIS-delivered content, including high-speed data and voice, operators can achieve another 40 percent or better reduction in comparison to how bandwidth is consumed when services are siloed into separate IP, MPEG-2 broadcast and MPEG-2 unicast streams (see September 2009, p. 32).

Beyond these steps the MSO can use the IP equivalent of switched digital video, which involves a complex approach to IP multicast that only sends a live linear program to a service group when at least one person in the group asks for it. This serves to minimize the number of channels being delivered to any given service area at any given time by a significant amount compared to what the channel count would be if the entire broadcast lineup were delivered at one time.

“The bandwidth savings depends on how many channels are available over the multicast network in proportion to the number of users, with the savings increasing as that ratio increases,” notes the unnamed vendor executive quoted earlier. The bandwidth savings could be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent, depending on that ratio.

Thus, in the case where a very small proportion of users on a given node in the HFC network are equipped with gateways to receive all-IP service it’s likely an operator, using all the techniques described here, could offer a full-channel load along with unicast streams to serve on-demand requirements over just four bonded channels. “A lot depends on how many unicast streams you have to deliver, which depends on how many devices are accessing on-demand content,” the executive says. “That unicast count can go up pretty fast, so you’d want to get beyond four bonded channels as soon as possible.”

Operators can also apply various techniques on the unicast side so as to limit bandwidth consumption, possibly in conjunction with use of adaptive streaming, where the data rate and therefore the quality of resolution on certain content could be throttled down when there’s a threat of congestion. But how far operators would want to go in this direction is questionable.

The larger question respecting the way IP content is delivered using these various techniques is whether cable operators want to manage their IP flows through the capabilities of the PacketCable Multimedia protocol, which is an extension of the PacketCable protocol developed to support voice-over-IP service in cable, or to rely on the mechanisms used in conjunction with HTTP over IP. This is a huge question with respect to the types of gear and architecture to be deployed in support of all-IP services. On the one hand PCMM provides an extensive set of tools for managing services that are well suited to the DOCSIS HFC environment; on the other hand an HTTP-based approach to streaming architecture keeps the MSO on track to exploit ongoing developments in the Internet technology domain.

One of the advantages to pursuing the gateway approach to IP where the lion’s share of service is delivered over MPEG transport and then encapsulated for IP distribution to IP devices in the home is that operators can take advantage of the whole-home benefits of operating in IP mode while postponing the transition to all-IP delivery until chips supporting 16- or 24-channel bonding are in the market, which will happen over the course of the next couple of years. At that point it will be possible to convert a large number of customers to the IP flow, including “flash-cut” scenarios where, on a node-by-node basis, once all users are equipped with the hybrid gateways, the MPEG transport stream could be turned off and the IP stream turned on, obviating the need for simulcasting.

It happens that availability of such channel-bonding chips in mid to late 2012 will coincide with the projected time frame for commercial availability of the chips designed to support the new CMAP (Converged Multimedia Access Platform) architecture developed by Comcast engineers and now embraced by a number of major MSOs, though not all. As previously reported (June, p. 8), this technology will provide operators a flexible approach to assigning bandwidth to MPEG transport streams versus IP streams while greatly reducing the number of QAMs (quadrature amplitude modulators) required to support multiple types of service.

With the availability of CMAP devices, which would supplant today’s CMTSs, operators would be positioned to transition to IP TV much more gracefully and at lower costs than is possible today. But here again the question of consensus on key issues arises, as various MSOs move to adapt the CMAP concept to different strategies. Sources report that these variations are adding still another layer of uncertainty in efforts to develop solutions that can benefit from the economies of scale that standards-based solutions enjoy.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the transformation to IP – is it a revolution or evolution?” Burke notes. “What you’re seeing is most operators saying the evolution approaches make a lot of sense right now. So I think that’s the path you’ll see over the next couple of years.”

Comcast Inaugurates IPv6 Trial Supporting Dual-Stack Access

Fred

Posted in: Network Technology, Service Providers

John Brzozowski, distinguished engineer & chief architect for IPv6, Comcast

February 25, 2011 – Fred Dawson, Editor – The cable industry’s implementation of IPv6, the next generation in IP addressing, moved a significant step forward in January with Comcast’s announcement it had become the first service provider to employ what is known as Native Dual Stack on an operating DOCSIS network in North America.

What this means is that 25 IPv6-enabled users in Littleton, Colo. can now access content and services natively over both IPv6 and IPv4, says John Brzozowski, distinguished engineer and chief architect for IPv6 at Comcast. Writing in a recent blog on the company’s Web site, Brzozowski adds, “As a result, they do not need to use any tunneling or translation solutions, including Network Address Translation (NAT); they can access IPv6 and IPv4 directly at high speed in an unencumbered fashion.”

While Comcast has long been running Dual Stack over its backbone network, moving Dual Stack to the access side has been a more difficult undertaking where modems must be equipped to operate in Dual Stack mode, provisioning mechanisms must be in place to deliver IPv6-based service and the plethora of back-office and network components tied to broadband services and features, including the all-important DNS (Domain Name System) servers, must all be equipped to work with IPv6 addresses. Given that the IPv6 addressing system with its 128- digit field as compared to the 32-digit field of IPv4 is completely incompatible with IPv4, the challenges to introducing IPv6 on a wide scale are immense.

“This achievement is a key demonstration and ongoing test of our ability to offer Native Dual Stack Internet services leveraging our production DOCSIS 3.0 network,”Brzozowski says. He describes the development as “a tremendous milestone for Comcast, cable operators, DOCSIS technology, and the Internet community at large.”

Helping things along is the fact that support for IPv6 was built into the DOCSIS 3.0 protocol, which means all 3.0 modems and CMTSs (cable modem termination systems) are equipped to operate in Dual-Stack mode. If a dual-stacked network device such as the CMTS queries the name of a destination and the DNS gives it an IPv4 address (a DNS A Record), the CMTS sends IPv4 packets. If the DNS responds with an IPv6 address (a DNS AAAA Record), it sends IPv6 packets.

On the customer premises side, when the IPv6-capable 3.0 cable modems provision in IPv6 they use stateful DHCPv6 (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6) to acquire their IPv6 address, which is basically how modems provision with IPv4. The cable modem can provision itself for IPv4, IPv6 or Dual Stack mode, where it gets both an IPv4 and IPv6 address to support all types of devices on the premises network. Recently, CableLabs extended DOCSIS 2.0 specifications to accommodate upgrades of 2.0 CMTSs and modems to support IPv6 and Dual Stack as well.

Comcast is using CMTS and cable modem equipment from ARRIS to connect the Littleton trial customers along with home networking equipment from Apple, Brzozowski says. “We will broaden the trial to include other vendors soon,” he adds.

Brzozowski says Comcast will soon be expanding its Dual-Stack testing to other cable systems in other parts of the country. But even as it broadens Dual-Stack operations to the point of commercial rollouts the MSO will have more to accomplish in a forthcoming Phase 3 of its IPv6 implementation.

That’s because there’s one essential drawback to Dual Stack as a migration strategy, which is that for every IPv4 device connected by an IPv6 subscriber, there has to be a new IPv4 address provisioned, given the fact that there is no IPv6 NAT to use for extending private addresses to IPv4 devices, which is standard practice with use of multiple devices by any given customer in the IPv4 realm. IPv6 dispenses with NAT because, with over 300 trillion trillion trillion address combinations available, every device can be given its own address with no fear of running out.

This means that Native Dual Stack will last just so long as an ISP has IPv4 addresses to hand out. Of course, the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses is what prompted implementation of IPv6 in the first place. Thus, Dual Stack is not to be seen as a way to prolong address exhaust but rather as the best way to prepare for the eventual cutover to a predominantly IPv6 mode of operations while assuring there will be support for legacy IPv4 devices for some time to come.

Phase 3 for Comcast will involve implementation of what is known as Dual Stack Lite, a mode of preserving IPv4 addresses in Dual-Stack operations developed by Comcast and now under consideration as a standard at the Internet Engineering Task Force. DS Lite provides a means by which all IPv4 traffic destined for IPv6-addressed customers is delivered over stateless IPv6 tunnels using what is known as Carrier Grade NAT to assign private addresses behind a single IPv4 address across multiple users on the network. This solution, now in development as an IETF standard, would require that new customers who receive IPv6 addresses be equipped with gateways that perform this tunneling, avoiding the need to implement NAT for IPv4 devices at the customer premises.

Comcast and the non-profit group Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) have released open source Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) software to facilitate service providers’ implementation of DS-Lite. AFTR, the heart of the IPv4-IPv6 CGN translation process, operates in conjunction with another new element, the DS-Lite Basic Bridging BroadBand element (B4), which resides in each IPv6 gateway device as the tunneling point for sending IPv4 traffic through the IPv6 network to the translation center.

Obviously there’s a long way to go for Comcast, let alone other cable companies, which are in various stages of moving along the path Comcast has taken, but with the benefit of using what the MSO has learned to expedite their own evolution. CableLabs has been a key part in facilitating the process, assisting with development of advanced modem standards, selecting migration strategies best suited for cable and conducting interoperability events to help ensure vendors are keeping pace with developments.

Meanwhile, with the depletion of new IPv4 addresses imminent, time to prepare is shrinking rapidly. At the beginning of 2009 the total number of addresses available for allocation through the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) pool represented about 12 percent of the 2.7 billion addresses originally allocated for public use. At the start of 2010 the percentage was down to 10 percent, and by midyear it had dropped to six percent. According to statistics supplied by IANA, there were more new addresses issued in the first half of 2010 than there were in all of 2009.

IANA hands out address blocks to various regions of the world, where allocation to ISPs and other entities is handled by regional administrators. ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, says it will exhaust its share of IANA-supplied IPv4 addresses for North America as of March 2012, at which point it will be impossible for ISPs to obtain new ones. Then it becomes a matter of how many addresses each ISP has in reserve as to when their individual supplies will run out.

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Consumer Services
- MSOs Explore Ways to Expand TV Everywhere Service Appeal
Business Services
- Cloud Services Become All-In Game for NSPs
Mobile Services & Devices
- Progress on Key Issues Offers Hope for Cable Wi-Fi Agenda
Navigation & Convergence
- Cable Voice Everywhere Initiative Taps New Trans-Service Platform
Premises Devices & Networking
- Broadcom Chipsets Harbinger Big Changes in Cable TV Tiers
Network Technology
- Start-Up Aims to Mitigate OTT Video Traffic Burden
Operations Technology
- ROI Potential of M2M Services Rises with Sector-Specific OSS
Regulation & Finance
- Issues Cloud Wireless Spectrum Goals
March 2012 Print Issue

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Service Providers

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