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NCTA Celebrates 48th Annual Convention
Industry Gears Up For High-Speed Future
By Jennifer Whalen and Greta Durr

• Technology shares the stage
• Home is where the network is
• Beyond todays topologies
• Topics in broadband data networking
• Products galore

	Jennifer Whalen

Technology shares the stage

The rapid development of technology that will drive greater interactivity and increase customer choice had executives at Cable 99 euphoric over cables future prospects.

"Leading the pace of consolidation is the rapid rise of technology," said Michael Armstrong, chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T. He cited advances in Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) modems, digital set-tops, and deployment of the digital cable infrastructure as key drivers of cables future.

"Where were going is interactivitya future where television breaks out of the passive mode, forever, and adds a dimension of consumer control that, until now, has been just talk," he added.

Key to interactivity is the set-top. "The most significant thing in the cable industry today is the proliferation of the digital set-top box," said Gerald Levine, chairman and CEO of Time Warner. Levine praised the additional channels, near video-on-demand (NVOD), and eventually VOD services that digital networks can deliver.

Brian Roberts, president of Comcast Corp. concurred. "Theres an unstoppable march to giving customers more choice. Thats what the Internet is about. Thats what these boxes are about."

Comcast ought to know. The cable operator is deploying between 7,000 and 8,000 digital set-tops a week, Roberts reported, and expects to have 350,000 to 400,000 digital TV subscribers by years end.

Still, not everyone was falling over with enthusiasm for video-on-demand and digital services in general. "Weve been hearing about (VOD) forever, and it still hasnt happened," said Sumner Redstone, chairman and CEO of Viacom International, which owns Blockbuster Video. "The boxes become outdated almost before they are deployed. The studios are not going to risk what theyre getting from the rental business on what doesnt exist."

So what does the future hold? "The TV will become Internet-enabled. Thats an exciting prospect," predicted Paul Allen of Vulcan Northwest. Allen also envisions new consumer electronic devices, such as an impulse buy button on a remote control for purchasing products shown in commercials.

Levine forecast continued proliferation of digital set-tops with rollout of true VOD services as well as broadband streaming of video to the Internet. "We will be compensated by having smaller nodes and dark fiber turned up," he said. Levine also predicted higher penetration of telephony.

Home is where the network is

Judging from the standing-room only crowd in the "Home Area Networking" session, the home is the next great networking frontier. Why the burst of good feelings for an idea thats been around a long time? According to IDC research, by 2002, 23 million households will have multiple personal computers (PCs), and half of those will be networked, reported Thomas Funk, vice president of the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance and manager of business development at Compaq. Research indicates that these same households also are those most likely to buy always-on, broadband Internet services from cable companies, he added.

Work-at-home applications, device sharing and the desire for integrated communications are driving the interest in home networking, reported David Benham, manager of product marketing at Cisco Systems. Key to adoption of these networks is using the existing wiring in the home. "The mantra is no new wires."

But in order for the home networking market to take off, Benham advised cable operators to remember three things.

1) Dont live off of consumer subscription fees alone, and dont focus on getting equipment off the books. He suggested that cable operators subsidize any at-home networking equipment needed to link PCs, digital VCRs and TV sets, digital versatile disk (DVD) players, printers and other devices. Such subsidies also can be arranged via partnerships with the workplace, government, advertisers, or by building equipment costs into subscription fees.

2) Dont only give consumers a PC-centric service. "Even at zero dollars, the PC isnt the right package," Benham said. Research from IDC predicts that shipments of consumer information appliances will outstrip home PC sales starting in 2001.

3) Dont only give the consumer Ethernet for a home local area network (LAN). Benham picked the Home PNA, power line and wireless technologies as those with the most potential for home networking.

According to Benham, winners in the home networking space will provide:

• Integrated services and billing
• Bundled devices with service subscriptions
• Subsidized home equipment from sources other than the consumer
• No new wires

Connecting the home network to the cable network will require continued refinement of the residential gateway, which provides interoperability between the broadband network and the home network, said Paul Pishal, director of business development with Philips Broadband Networks. "You have two initiativesa digital initiative on the cable side and a networking initiative on the consumer side, and they have to be tied together."

The residential gateway offers several operational benefits, including single point of interconnection, fault isolation and performance isolation, Pishal reported. When changes take place in either the home or the broadband network, the gateway can mediate the changes without requiring the consumer to update every digital appliance in the home.

Work needs to be done to make this a reality. "Shared technical requirements must be developed to ensure timely development of new products and services. A focused cable industry initiative should be accelerated in order to align targets for network-to-network services and to have end-to-end service delivery."

Beyond todays topologies

Led by moderator Alex Best, senior vice president of engineering at Cox, "Beyond Todays Topologies" included presentations from an array of cable luminaries.

Preparation was the general theme of the technical session; designing the most flexible possible networks today, said the panelists, will allow the advanced services of tomorrow.

Vice President of Engineering at AT&T B&IS Oleh Sniezko rallied support for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) in his presentation on "Reverse Path for Advanced ServicesArchitecture and Technology."

With changing times in the broadband industry come opportunities, he said, and DWDM has emerged as a dynamic means of future-proofing his systems.

While DWDM provides the greatest flexibility, combining it with digitizing the reverse path signals and time division multiplexing (TDM) them is a reasonable compromise to approach his engineering goals. "Although some level of flexibility is lost, benefits such as increased link robustness and performance transparency offset the loss," he explained.

Xiaolin Lu of AT&T Labs followed with the "HFC Architecture in the Making" presentation. "To show that were not just a bunch of nerds fooling around with thousands of dollars in the lab," his team recently performed a six-month study that involved different architectures in various scenarios over a 600-mile stretch of cable.

His findings? "There are opportunities to improve while migrating to future architectures" as the industry struggles to push fiber progressively deeper into the field.

"Theres a lot of redundancy we can take advantage of here," said CableLabs Majid Chelehmal during his talk on "Cable Headend Architecture for the Delivery of Multimedia Services."

"The specification of headend interfaces needs to be taken into consideration in moving ahead with these new services."

Chelehmal highlighted the hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks capability to stealthily deliver various services and applications. Having the proper interfaces to bring it all together on the network is critical to network performance. "Sometimes, not having the right interface means longer integrations," said Chelehmal.

Like remultiplexing, the cable modem termination system (CMTS) plays an important role in interfacing Internet signals to the headend, he said. Ways the headend equipment may be used depend on the systems architecture. "You can configure equipment easily with a headend that has a flexible architecture," he explained.

"Training really becomes key for using these services from the headend perspective," he concluded, noting that with the new services on the cable industrys horizon, new skills are necessary to maintain a healthy headend.

Topics in broadband data networking

Self-service activation and blending technologies for high-speed data deployment took center stage in the "Topics in Broadband Data Networking" conference, also moderated by Prime Cables Dan Pike.

Bruce Bahlmann, senior systems engineer for MediaOnes Corporate Internet Services Group, explored the many possibilities of self-installation with a field study, which reported findings of a 1998 MediaOne study on the subject.

Bahlmann said that 83 customers in the companys Minnesota system participated in the program and were supplied with self-installation kits. The test group consisted of what Bahlmann called "technically savvy early adopters." "Only one of them couldnt do it," he said. "In the beginning, he talked a good game, but when it came down to it, he was lost."

Most of the participants reported the installation process took only a couple of hours, and the process was comparable to configuring a PC in terms of difficulty, he said.

In order to stay competitive, Bahlmann stressed, the processes involved with data service application must be streamlined if operators wish to remain competitive and able to scale the business they hope to cultivate. With proper execution, self-installation can save operators time and money.

Jeff Tocar, president of products, goods and services at High Speed Access Corp., discussed "Operating in the World of HFC, DSL (digital subscriber line), and Other Transport Technologies."

Tocar said that with the DOCSIS standards in place and the proliferation of DOCSIS-based modems, cable operators are in a fine position to make a big splash in the rapidly emerging high-speed Internet market.

"Cable operators can take the lead in almost every market today," he said. Because the cable industry is at the core of datas future development, it has an advantage as telephone companies, wireless and satellite providers vie for a chunk of the growing business.

Products galore

It wasnt just the technical sessions that captured attention. Vendors took advantage of the hoopla to introduce a variety of new products. For a quick look at the latest technology, check out Communications Technologies "Marketplace."

Jennifer Whalen is editor of "Communications Technology"

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