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January 2003 Issue

PULSE

Ask the Experts

Deploy Now?

Bob Chism is CTO of the XSTREME Division at Concurrent Computer Corp. (www.ccur.com).

Engineers with limited budgets need evidence that investing in VOD technology will produce revenue results quickly. What proof is there that now is the time to deploy?

"If the investment has already been made in the digital network, then VOD is a good way to start generating revenue from that investment. I would point out that the return on investment with VOD has been proven. Obviously the payback period can vary per system based on a number of variables, but it usually is excellent, especially with respect to other services that MSOs might roll out."

How can MSOs alleviate the usage strain that VOD puts on their networks?

"Usage strain on the network can be managed by considering the network configuration during the planning stages. Generally, MSOs build distributed or hybrid architectures to alleviate transport bandwidth requirements, but transport costs are coming down, and centralized architectures are becoming more compelling, especially for small systems."

Understanding Network Management

Carrie Packer is vice president of eastern engineering for C.COR's (www.c-cor.net) Broadband Management Solutions Division.

What's the most misunderstood aspect of network management within the broadband engineering community? "The benefits associated with having effective processes, procedures, tools, and resources committed to managing the networks are not clearly understood. Qualified, trained individuals need to have the right tools and well-defined processes and procedures to be effective in their assigned positions. This allows the individuals to manage their way through network crises as opposed to being reactive to them."

DOCSIS 2.0

Elisa Camahort is a senior director of product marketing at Terayon (www.terayon.com) Digital Cable Solutions Group.

When operators start to deploy DOCSIS 2.0, how will they integrate it within their existing systems?

"DOCSIS is designed to be backward-compatible, and this applies to DOCSIS 2.0. You can put our 2.0 modems in the field even if you haven't upgraded your CMTS, and vice versa. And you can have a mixed environment, so the transition is designed to be simple and allow the operator to move at its chosen pace.

"More than that, deploying 2.0 gear can bring greater efficiency to your mixed environment. For example, our CMTS upstream advanced physical layer can help DOCSIS 1.0 modems without equalizers consistently operate at 16-QAM. Having 2.0 modems in a channel improves the throughput for the entire channel, even DOCSIS 1.x modems on that channel (due to the fact that 2.0 requires fewer mini-slots to transmit the same amount of data, and this frees up mini-slots)."

Modem Market Up 19% in 3Q

Worldwide cable modem market shipments totaled more than 3 million units in the third quarter of 2002, a 19.4 percent increase from the same period last year, says Gartner Dataquest. Motorola remained No. 1 with 32.6 percent of the market, continuing to do well in the DOCSIS space, where it was also the top vendor. Non-DOCSIS units accounted for only 1.3 percent of worldwide cable modem CPE units in 3Q02.

 Back to January 2003 Issue

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