Archives

June 2003 Issue

Maximize

How to Use the Latest Broadband Technologies to Drive New Services and Revenues

Fighting Theft Requires Autonomy and PR

Don't let your audit techs do installs, and educate the community about cable theft. So say the winners in this year's cable and broadband security case study competition.

Sponsored by the Broadband and Internet Security Task Force, a collaboration of cable operators, programmers and equipment vendors, this year's competition saw winners from Time Warner Cable's Syracuse, N.Y., and South Carolina divisions.

The winning submission from Geff Denee, technical supervisor of the Syracuse division's signal security department, focusses on identifying, tracking, converting and/or prosecuting unauthorized viewers. A cable veteran who began as an installer 20 years ago, Denee gives credit to division President Mary Cotter, "who left us enough space so we could built a department."

"We are tech, and we aren't tech," Denee, explains. "We're kind of a separate entity altogether." He adds that his nine audit technicians are insulated from pressure to perform installations. "Their mission is to do audits," he says.

The Syracuse division's security department relies on two separate subscriber sets: a "green bar" audit report of all subscribers, as well as from a list of all cancelled installations. Its goal is to terminate unauthorized cable use while aiming for a high rate of reclaimed subscribers.

A combined tally of audit and cancelled installation work revealed that from 1996 to 2002, the department found 17,197 unauthorized viewers. Converted customers, meanwhile, amounted to 4,915, or 28.6 percent of that total population.

Denee estimates the reclaimed monthly revenue at about $200,000, but downplays that metric: "The realization that a successful audit department can increase the subscriber base is paramount."

Pirate patrol

Time Warner's South Carolina division knew it had a problem with "pirate-box" end users. The division also realized that it needed a multiphased strategy to reduce their number, deter their future use and recover lost programming costs.

Security Director Austin Coates says the awareness and education phase of the division's strategy involved bringing judges, prosecutors and police officers up to speed on "black box" issues, as well as raising public awareness over the legality and overall financial impact of unauthorized decoder use.

The operational and criminal litigation phase shifted into the acquisition of leads and tips and development of cases through both search warrants and "knock-and-talk" tactics, in which a Time Warner employee would accompany a police officer empowered under the "Plain View Doctrine" to identify and seize illegal boxes.

In the civil litigation and recovery phase, the South Carolina system sent up to two Demand Letters, and in the absence of settlement, would then file action in the state's Summary Court. (For practical reasons, it had opted against invoking federal law.)

Illegal boxes seized

The upshot was the seizure of more than 1,000 illegal decoders and the prosecution of 312 criminal cases, the recovery of $377,000 in settlements and $301,000 in judgments.

"A lot depends on how the industry reacts to this issue," says Ralph Valente, secretary of the Task Force's board and an executive at ShowTime. If growth remains a core industry goal, for example, Valente says it's imperative to "convert those who have access to service but have chosen not to pay for it."

And growth is more likely in a climate that sanctions rather than condones that particular choice.

-- Jonathan Tombes

Training for New Services

The cable industry's migration from solely offering analog entertainment video to purveying mission-critical telecommunications services means that engineering staffs have greater responsibilities to educate other system personnel, experts say. In extreme cases, not incorporating input from engineering staffs could doom an otherwise solid new offering to failure, they add.

This education is done in cross-discipline teams in which engineers must explain the essence of the underlying technology in lay terms. "My experience with our technical experts is our communication with them is absolutely critical," says Margaret Acker-Blardo, manager of the national curriculum team for Cox Communications.

The cross-functional teams, which also could include marketing, operations, finance and even vendor representatives, need to be formed from the moment work commences on a launch, says Debbie Manoff, director, training for the SCTE.

Engineering meets marketing

As new services become more technical, engineering departments are increasingly central to the marketing, sales and service efforts. For instance, sales people won't get anywhere unless they know the basics of voice over IP (VoIP) and how it differs from traditional telephone services.

Customer service representatives (CSRs) need to know what kind of premise equipment is used, how it is provisioned and steps to get it operational without dispatching a truck. Engineers who hold this knowledge must help create materials in which these and similar questions are answered in a way that is understandable to nonengineers.

Experts note that the nature of the types of products that are being introduced today--such as multi-ISP data services, home networking, cable telephony and others--is far more complex than incremental introductions in earlier decades, which featured easier to understand concepts such as new channels and pay-per-view.

This makes knowledge transfer especially important. "The technology could ultimately fail not because it's inadequate but because the people out there performing customer support don't know how to sell and how to service it," says Trish Maher, a principal of Maher & Maher, a company that provides training and consulting services to broadband companies and the government.

The key is for engineering departments to demand a place at the table when it comes to planning rollouts in general and training system personnel in particular. In addition to more savvy customers, launches are happening far more often, and it is far less likely that operators have the money to outsource launches. "It's really important to have training involved early in the process," Manoff says.

-- Carl Weinschenk

The Case Against VOD Over-Provisioning

Tim Cahall is CEO of Manticom Networks, a developer of Ethernet switching and transport technology. A former executive with Trellis Photonics and Lucent Technologies, he shared ideas on VOD provisioning.

Q: In a point-to-point VOD solution, you've said that most MSOs wind up installing up to five times the amount of network they need. What are they unnecessarily installing? What are their alternatives?

Cahall: VOD is a service that is fundamentally different than services currently being offered by MSOs over their HFC networks since it is a 'one-to-one' service. This means that there is a single video stream being dedicated to a single customer. With the introduction of gigabit Ethernet as a new means of transport and the replacement of the legacy digital video broadcast (DVB) asynchronous serial interface (ASI) transport technology, a major improvement has been achieved.

However, most current Ethernet implementations (Layer 1, or "point-to-point") actually lead to an under-utilization of the MSO's network assets. The MSO ends up implementing an "over-capacity" of transport equipment as much as X times. From a technical standpoint, Layer 2 or higher solutions fulfill the criteria to match the dynamics of this bandwidth-on-demand service but are simply not cost effective to support the VOD business case of an MSO.

Q: You've also called VOD a 'lumpy' service. Will you explain that, and discuss how spreading Ethernet switches across the geography of the network can help?

Cahall: What I mean by that is that you really can't predict what the usage is going to be. There's no way to predetermine how many streams you're going to need at any given time, at any given location. As we have seen with other opt-in services, such as NVOD, consumer behavior varies widely by location, time of day, demographics and the content being offered.

I do think that you will continue to see lumpiness but I do think the delta between the peak and the average usage, which is currently very large, will shrink.

Q: Manticom's platform, which scales from 2.5 Gbps to 20 Gbps, can push VOD economics below $35 per-provisioned subscriber. How did you arrive at those numbers, and are they 'real-world'?

Cahall: As a starting point, we used the common metric in the industry in order to calculate the transport of bandwidth from the video server to the hub. Manticom's solution is competitive with any Layer 1 solution. However, Layer 1 Ethernet is a point-to-point solution. As you don't know in which hub the next request for VOD will occur, you're forced to over-provision your network. Therefore, we introduced a new metric, the cost-per- provisioned subscriber.

When you bring the over-provisioning factor into the equation, the cost increases significantly for Layer 1 solutions. With Layer 2 solutions, over-provisioning is not necessary. From Day One, we set a benchmark for ourselves to provide Layer 2 functionality at Layer 1 pricing. When you add the over-provisioning effect to a real-world network, the difference between our solution and our competitors becomes substantial.

Back to June 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