Archives

TELEPHONY

Growth in the Desert

JUSTIN JUNKUS

Despite the current economic environment, some equipment vendors still believe that cable is a growth market. If you've read the summaries of Brian Roberts' keynote at the Broadband Plus 2002 show, you probably think I'm referring to companies that provide HFC plant upgrade solutions. While that is one growth opportunity in 2003, the interesting news is that nontraditional names with unexpected telephony solutions believe there are new opportunities in our back yards.

Challenging the conventional

Narad Networks (www.naradnetworks.com), for example, illustrates how challenging times breed innovative solutions. While most of us are looking toward DOCSIS 2.0 to expand upstream capacity with its new modulation methods, Narad has a different solution for two-way, symmetrical high-speed data that also has potential for telephony services.

Narad is a startup company that opened for business in 2000. Its NBAN (Narad Broadband Access Network) product promises 100 Mbps switched Ethernet over coax, using the frequency band above 860 MHz. Below 860 MHz, the spectrum is still divided into upstream and downstream portions, so the result is a three-part, rather than two-part, allocation of bandwidth.

The Narad architecture consists of four hardware elements placed on the HFC network where existing fiber nodes, distribution amplifiers, and taps are located. A fifth network element resides at the customer premises.

Splitting the spectrum into three parts is not new, as SCTE's Marv Nelson reminded me. "Time Warner proposed that approach to gain bandwidth for its Full Service Network. It's unconventional, and with the advent of DOCSIS, most operators have not elected that route."

But these are unconventional times, and there are multiple applications for such a solution. Chuck Kaplan, Narad's vice president of marketing, pointed out that NBAN technology can be used to provide multiple T-1 circuits over coaxial plant. He explained, "This capability is attractive to potential customers in the business market, where managers are always looking for cost-effective alternatives to leased T-1 lines between corporate sites."

Some operators choose to serve this market by dropping a new fiber line or leasing excess fiber capacity to businesses near their fiber runs. According to Kaplan, however, even with the new hardware required for NBAN, an HFC plant equipped with NBAN beats the operator's cost of running a fiber drop, and can provide a six-month payback for each T-1 offered.

This may seem like heresy, but I also can see an application to leverage constant bit rate (CBR) telephony. Admittedly, IP is the future of telephony, but there are several issues to resolve before it can become a scaleable service. Most revolve around the symmetrical nature of telephony services, and the limits on upstream capacity.

DOCSIS 2.0 greatly increases the potential capacity of the upstream, but testing, certification, and manufacture will take time. New codec technology also will help, but licensing issues need to be addressed. Node splitting and using multiple upstream carriers to provide additional return path capacity are also possible, but these can be major architectural changes.

Given that CBR telephony is a TDM-based service similar to T-1 technology, there might be some advantage to temporarily moving existing CBR telephony to the higher spectrum using the Narad technology. Upstream capacity in the 5 to 47 MHz range could be reclaimed for other applications while DOCSIS issues are resolved, and the triple play still could be offered.

New IP solutions

Shifting gears a bit, let's look at a couple of other vendors who have unconventional IP-based telephony solutions. This column discussed Cedar Point Communications (www.cedarpointcom.com) last summer. As you may recall, Cedar Point offers the Safari C3 Media Switching System, which Business Development V.P. Dave Speer describes as a "class 5 switch in a PacketCable environment." This product contains not only a switch, but also several PacketCable logical network elements in one hardware platform.

Cedar Point's legacy is telephony and data switching. Several of its development engineers have spent time with the likes of Nortel, Alcatel, Lucent and others in the telephony mainstream. Its founder, Mark Galvin, has held executive positions at Lucent, Excel Switching, Rascom, and Primary Rate, Inc., and is a known authority on switching technologies.

Cedar Point introduced the C3 Safari with a basic telephony feature set. When I revisited Dave at Broadband Plus 2002, he pointed out how having multiple network elements in one platform eases the task of new service creation. "With all the network elements in one box, the C3 Safari knows the activity of the call at all times. This means we don't need to test hundreds of external interfaces between network elements each time we create a new feature. Re-usable modules become building blocks for new features." The architecture makes it possible to create new services at off-line workstations using off-the-shelf flowcharting software.

If you'd rather go with standalone components, you may want to look into the service offered by Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com). This company provides hosted local phone service.

Net2Phone was one of the pioneers in Internet telephony. Its original products were PC interfaces and network gateways between the public switched telephone network and the Internet.

Under the hosting concept, Net2Phone designs, maintains, and owns an IP network which interfaces with an operator's HFC plant. Cablevision of Puerto Rico is using this solution to provide local telephone service to its customers. In December 2002, Net2Phone announced an alliance with ARRIS to expand its offering to large-scale telephony deployments built around a PacketCable-compliant IP architecture.

Finally, operations system support (OSS) vendors also are thinking hard about new products for the cable space. On that front, I am impressed by the Teradyne's NetFlare(TM) product. Teradyne (www.teradyne.com) has its roots in testing gear. It designed NetFlare to monitor quality of service (QoS) on DSL lines, and is now looking to the cable market for further application of that product.

NetFlare allows a customer service rep to remotely monitor the segments of a customer's network connection for performance degradation and share a graphical interface representation of network conditions with the end user via a web interface. Often, the operator's network is not at fault for QoS degradation. With the ability to pin-point problem segments with the end user visually involved in the process, the rep can more easily explain to the customer where problems occur.

According to NetFlare product manager Bruce Collins, NetFlare provides far more information than simple trace route utilities. "With NetFlare, the operator has monitoring equipment at the network edge, between its access network and the Internet. This provides a way to send test packets both ways and rapidly depict throughput and latency conditions across both the Internet and the customer access network."

These illustrations are just a few examples of companies looking to our industry for their future. Telephony believes there is growth in cable. How soon cable will believe there is growth in telephony?

Justin J. Junkus is president of KnowledgeLink, Inc. Reach him at .

 Back to January 2003 Issue

Access Intelligence's CABLE GROUP
Communications Technology | CableFAX Daily | CableFAX's CableWORLD | CT's Pipeline
CableFAX Magazine | CableFAX databriefs | Broadband Leaders Retreat | CableFAX Leaders Retreat