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JIM BARTHOLD
'Twas a month before budgets and all through the show, the vendors had ops trapped with no place to go
It's been said that the Western Show, through timing and focus, is a pre-holiday/pre-annual budget shopping mart for geeks.
The techno types come to the show prepared with wish lists they hope to see filled by vendors who hope to start the new year by snaring either a big sale or at least generating some customer attention.
While Excite CTO Milo Medin's head won't be dancing with visions of sugar plums when he strolls into the Los Angeles Convention Center this month, it will be filled with gadgets and geegaws that could make his network, already the high-speed data access leader, even stronger in a broadband marketplace where speed is commonplace and other factors are differentiators.
Medin agreed to share his thoughts about the show and what he'll be looking for - besides the latest Disney pins - as he stalks the rug-covered aisles.
"You wouldn't get all the stuff I want to make our service better at the Western Show because some of this high-end network switching equipment you wouldn't necessarily see at a cable show," he says.
On the other hand, there will be more of it than ever as traditional non-cable vendors such as Cisco, Lucent, Nortel and ADC consume booth space with products that, in the past, would have breezed over the heads of Western Show-goers.
One such item, Medin hopes, will be a CMTS that is "denser and has a better network management ability."
Such a device, he thinks, would allow the service provider to "tell a lot more RF parameters about what's going on in the RF network from the CMTS itself."
Medin says he wants it to be "denser" because "a lot of the headend facilities have very little space available in them. What you want is not something that takes seven rack units (RUs) but something that could do two rack units and be able to support more lines, more downstreams, more reverses in a smaller form factor."
Since this is a "wish list," Medin has a few more things he'd like to see in this CMTS. It would, he says, be DOCSIS 1.0-qualified but upgradable to DOCSIS 1.1.
"You'd love to have 1.1, but I think I settled for 1.0 that had the ability to be upgraded to 1.1," he concedes. "You want to make sure that what you're deploying doesn't prohibit you from running 1.1"
DOCSIS itself is a primary reason Medin's in the market for smaller headend gear.
"All the larger systems these days are doing DOCSIS overlays to convert proprietary systems," he explains. "When you're doing that overlay, you have all this old proprietary equipment in your headend you can't turn off. You have to do an overlay, (and) you might not have a lot of room in these headends. Having really dense CMTS equipment is something that would be particularly helpful."
Another network component for which Medin is shopping - and Excite actually has an RFP on the street - is "something you typically wouldn't find at the Western Show ... very high-end switching gear ... with traffic shaping and quality of service capability to allow you to prefer certain flows over other flows."
This, Medin says, would require a "really dense" two-RU configuration and "a very cheap DWDM (dense wave division multiplex) system, something really stupid, that doesn't do all the fancy optical cross connect but simply allows you to pick up multiple channels from a fiber system."
Such gear, he theorizes, would let a service provider run SONET (Switched Optical Network) equipment, if necessary, and also take the Internet Protocol (IP) network and run it on top of the WDM.
"It would be very compact, and the optical gear is stupid because you want that gear to be very simple. Then you want to have your very high-performance IP switching done that would plug in and give you the ability to shape traffic and police flows in the system," he says.
While he doesn't expect to find a whole aisle of this kind of gear, Medin's confident he'll see something in L.A. that whets his appetite.
"I definitely think you'll find some of that WDM optical gear there because cable operators have these large fiber-optic networks. (They) want to run multiple services on them, but because the services themselves are very popular, they want to keep services separate. WDM allows you to build your network in a way optimized for IP (and) your SONET network optimized for private line, maybe a switched network to optimize your circuit switched telephony," he says.
Another item Medin is confident he'll see - at least in prototype form - is a cable modem with a built-in wireless network adapter.
"You could put the cable modem where there's a TV jack and not have to actually add a jack where the PC is," he says. "You'd use a wireless network adapter or maybe an HPNA adapter, and it would be built into the modem."
While convenience and helping subscribers link more PCs to the cable modems are certainly benefits, the main reason for this device is cost, Medin says, noting it removes extraneous microprocessing and powering needed by outboard devices.
"It also simplifies management because you want to bury it into the device so you can manage it and not have the consumer having to deal with all the complexity of set-up," he says.
Medin, like a boy wanting a pony for Christmas, doesn't hold too much hope for finding two other items on his wish list.
The first, the ability to do very dense, inexpensive packet channelized voice conversion, is just not ready for primetime, he figures. The other, an advanced set-top box that could serve as a platform for streaming video through a DOCSIS modem, is not politically correct.
Voice service, he says, is on the way, and the gear will soon be on hand to deliver it.
"I believe Excite carries more voice-over-IP traffic than any other network in the world," he says. "It's just not being done as a service by or the cable operators. The consumers are doing it themselves."
This, he feels, should be rolled into the package.
"There are opportunities there that are not 911 grade services but basically things that consumers want," he says. "There will be opportunities ... later on in the year as your subscriber base continues to grow. A lot of those subscribers are going to be running telephony services over the network."
The final wish on his list, Medin admits, isn't likely to happen.
"That's an advanced set-top box that you could use as a platform for streaming video through a DOCSIS modem - an advanced box that would support conventional digital video with all the proprietary encryption but also with the ability for you to stream video to it through an embedded DOCSIS modem," he says.
Since there will be digital boxes with embedded DOCSIS modems all over the place, it's surprising there's something they won't be able to do. The reason, he says, is because box makers don't have an incentive "to move high quality digital video transmission out of their proprietary encryption environment, which is what you would get if you could stream to the MPEG decoder."
This, he says, cripples Excite's chances of becoming a streaming video-on-demand provider while damaging the service provider's flexibility in how it offers video services.
"You want to be able to deploy a box that gives you your standard digital video service today but has the ability for you to move video through the DOCSIS modem as a bridge technology to an IP-based video-on-demand service and, over time, shift where the bandwidth is going from your proprietary carriers into your DOCSIS carriers," he says.
"I'll be shopping for it. I don't think I'll find it."
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