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Jim Barthold
The cable industry's inexorable move toward IP telephony continued last week as General Instrument Corp. and Telcordia Technologies Inc. (formerly Bellcore) said they would pair up to develop a cable IP network solution.
The pairing followed a similar announcement by Terayon Communications Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. that they would collaborate on an IP solution using Terayon modems.
All participants said they would follow CableLabs' Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) and PacketCable standardization efforts.
"I think one of the goals for our IP telephony solutions for cable is to leverage a lot of work that's being done in two-way networking on the DOCSIS standard and to allow operators to re-use those standards and a lot of that equipment," said David Fritch, product management director for Telcordia's next generation networks.
Rogers made it clear that the Terayon work would comply with DOCSIS standards.
"Our intention is very much to support them in terms of their DOCSIS direction," agreed Alexander Brock, VP-business development, Telecom of Rogers, and a member of CableLabs' PacketCable committee.
GI and Telcordia will initiate technology trials with unspecified operators with either a side-of-the-house unit or an out-of-the-way inside location. Future implementations will "enable IP telephony through our advanced digital set-top products as well as our cable modem products," said John Burke, VP-marketing, GI's advanced network and telecom systems (ANTS).
The unit, Burke emphasized, "makes use of the existing DOCSIS infrastructure. For instance, the CMTS (cable modem termination system) that's serving high-speed Internet access service ... will also provision telephone services over the network. It enables the operator to leverage the existing infrastructure that they have in place and offer new services off of it."
Fritch said the goal is to replace switching devices and provide a software layer to do call processing and service delivery for up to four phone lines.
"You're assigning a telephone number to a port and that port could be a telephone on a DCT-5000 (digital set-top); it could be a port on a cable modem; it could be one of the ports in the standalone telephone devices residing in the home," he said.
Fritch said that the switchless architecture's software "enables a lot more flexibility in terms of the provisioning of services and provisioning of new lines."
Burke emphasized that GI will offer an entire portfolio of customer premises equipment, including side-of-the-home implementations, a cable modem implementation and advanced interactive digital set-top implementations.
Rogers will use Terayon modems for telephony.
"Knowing they're going to do that means Terayon would have to move closer to DOCSIS 1.0 and 1.1 compatibility, for which I'm very pleased," said Steve Craddock, VP-new media development for Comcast Corp. and chairman of PacketCable's business committee.
CableLabs tapped Terayon and Broadcom Corp. to write specifications based on Terayon's Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (S-CDMA) technology for what is being labeled DOCSIS 1.2.
"If they weren't going to end up DOCSIS at the end of the day, then I wasn't interested. And if it wasn't going to be PacketCable-compliant, I wasn't interested as well," Craddock noted.
Because the alliance meets those needs, it has Craddock's support and encouragement, especially since he sees it as a way to answer client questions.
"The hardest nut to crack on this thing has been the client, because it has to be able to do the ringing; it has to be able to generate certain features; and there are some arguments whether you should have a rich client or a light client. That has ramifications on cost and reliability and power consumption," he explained.
The GI-Telcordia product should start in the $350 to $450 price range and drop sharply in the next few years, predicted Burke, noting that there has been little operator resistance to deploying side-of-the-house units.
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