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Feature: Has Open Access Got You Lost?
A Roadmap for Providing Choice—Part 1
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Open access weighs heavily on the minds of today’s cable engineers. You know it’s coming, but what exactly does open access mean? Does it only pertain to high-speed data (HSD) services? How will you implement it, and what are the challenges?

While the advent of open access promises to bring nothing but good things to customers, the challenges faced by vendors and broadband operators are extremely steep. In fact, many of the components required to completely implement an open broadband system do not exist yet. We’ll spend the next three issues dissecting this thorny problem.

What is open access?

The basic concept of open access is to provide individual broadband customers with a choice of service providers. The term "service provider" represents a supplier of content like information and entertainment or connectivity service. From here on out a service provider represents any company that can utilize the broadband media to deliver some service directly to customers. The breadth and scope of content and connectivity services available are limited only by the imagination. This is especially true as the amount of bandwidth available between the service provider and the customer increases.

The basic components

Open access will afford each broadband customer the opportunity to choose those service providers that best meet their needs. Figure 1 represents the major areas of challenge with regard to open access. They are basic hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) connectivity, connectivity management and service management.

Basic HFC connectivity in a completely open access environment goes beyond today’s single frequency pair. Basic HFC connectivity in this case represents a spectrum of bandwidth dedicated to open access and managed by the broadband operator. This bandwidth permits the guaranteed delivery of one or more subscribed services to every broadband customer. Connectivity management represents the low level switching and routing necessary to permit various service providers to deliver diverse connectivity options that do not interfere with one another. Lastly, service management administers the resulting array of service options that will be available, the presentation of these options to broadband customers, and the subscription changes to their respective service provider. Of the three components, service management represents a green field business area with few (if any) shipping products.

It’s more than data

Remember that open access means more than simply allowing customers to access the Internet as today’s high-speed data (HSD) over cable service provides. Open access means freedom of choice for all types of information and entertainment services via the broadband media (see Figure 2). Choice implies competition, and it’s competition that drives innovation, diversity, and value—all good things for broadband customers. Management components are essential to provide customers with an organized and fair selection of service and connectivity options.

While choice is to be commended, obstacles loom large for cable operators. Many of the components needed for an open broadband system aren’t available. Some of these challenges are described in this article.

Bandwidth is scarce

As the model of open access gains more popularity, traditional broadband operators will grow ever more limited as they continue supporting analog video along side new digital services. This is because it is too expensive for them to reclaim the bandwidth used by these analog systems because it would require their analog customers to return their set-top boxes in favor of a digital set-top (or equivalent).

In the meantime, new broadband operators (perhaps those who have overbuilt HFC to compete with traditional broadband operators) can maximize their use of the available bandwidth without giving up some of their best frequency spectrum to analog services. Until traditional cable operators can rid themselves of analog video, new broadband operators will enjoy a significant advantage. They will have more than twice the available bandwidth (of traditional cable providers) to deploy new services.

In contrast, traditional broadband operators must squeeze out everything they can from the new bandwidth made available as a result of upgrades. Those that have not yet upgraded cannot offer any new services without taking something away from their existing analog customers. Thus the problem of getting rid of analog video may slow or reduce the number of services that can be offered in an open access market.

Analog is inefficient

A customer watching a video program on a 6 MHz analog channel throws away the rest of the available spectrum on a 870 MHz system. Meaning, on an analog system if you are watching a program on one channel all the other programs running on other channels are still being received—they are just not being watched (tuned). This does not take into account the inefficiency inherent in using a full 6 MHz for viewing a single video program. Bandwidth needlessly is wasted in analog systems, and this wasted spectrum often is some of the best quality bandwidth that broadband operators have because it is usually the least prone to interference.

In contrast, a higher quality digital video channel requires only a fraction of this bandwidth—as many as 16 digital channels could occupy the same bandwidth as a single analog video channel. Additionally, broadband operators also broadcast channels that are rarely watched. In fact, a high percentage (as much as 30 percent to 40 percent) of a broadband operator’s content is viewed by less than 1 percent of its customers. This is the result of concessions made to obtain various franchise agreements as well as how certain video channels are packaged.

If progress is to be made in making broadband more bandwidth efficient, some mechanism is needed to distribute content only where it is subscribed. Video-on-demand (VOD) is the ultimate application of this, but it is only designed for single, well defined programs and not continually running events (for example, a 24-hour news channel). Products are needed to allow broadband operators to route more content to each customer or distribution hub rather than broadcast everything to everyone.

Fresh content, revolutionized distribution

Much of today’s broadband content is replicated. Essentially, it’s the same movies playing over and over again. Very few cable channels actually maintain "fresh" (continually changing) content—some examples of these include 24 hour news channels, sports channels, etc. Oddly enough, most all public broadcasting stations maintain "relatively fresh" content—as one is unlikely to see the same program twice in one day or during the same week.

Service providers that just repeat the same content over and over will face stiff challenges from more diverse service providers that offer fresh or personalized content on demand. The advent and perfection of VOD along with assembling extensive libraries of popular movies will decrease demand for long-standing movie channel providers.

Customers want to watch what they want when they want rather than what is playing at specific times that may or may not be convenient—that is the beauty of VOD. Although some movie channel providers produce some original content, it will be difficult for them to spin off as a separate service provider organization or sell their services directly to broadband customers, because they do not officially own a majority of their content.

It is the movie-making companies who are in the driver’s seat to make their extensive archive of movies available for VOD viewing. Such a service provider would be attractive to broadband operators and would permit movie-making companies to directly sell their movies to broadband customers. In the end, the number of service providers that offers movies would decrease or perhaps specialize into genre specific focuses (sci-fi, action/adventure, humor and so on). Regardless, the content distribution mechanism must be revolutionized.

Maximizing return on capital investments

Open access will challenge traditional broadband operators’ ability to compete with businesses that specialize in providing information and entertainment. Some new broadband operators have already taken a more toll-road type of common carrier approach as the time required to turn profit on capital investments to launch new content services is growing out of control.

To address this, broadband operators may need to create a separate operating group that could sell its information and entertainment services to several broadband operators. These new service providers would compete with other service providers to ensure that broadband customers receive increasingly better services and quality content. By doing this, smaller broadband operators could offer nearly the same content as larger operators (depending on their available bandwidth) without investing in costly capital equipment.

In this case, becoming a service provider also is more attractive because a single capital investment can claim several income streams. However, traditional broadband operators only have considered providing open access to the Internet. In the grand scheme of things, open access is not simply Internet access. Rather, open access means freedom for broadband customers to choose from a much broader array of information and entertainment services provided by a multitude of different entities. Open access for Internet service is but a small step in this direction, and more steps are needed to realize its full potential.

Rock-solid reliability

Before service providers can be successful using broadband, the HFC network must be tight and ultra reliable. By not having to seek new content services, broadband operators could invest more energy in scrutinizing minute changes in the HFC network in an effort to make broadband a very reliable transmission media. However, today’s operators are spread thin attempting to move new services onto broadband, while building up completely new HFC maintenance and network operations organizations. As a result, HFC maintenance, automation, and staffing takes a back seat to launching new services which are increasingly dependent on a rock-solid broadband transmission media.

While the broadband industry claims good network availability numbers, they are not "five nines" or 99.999 percent, let alone the old Bellcore spec of 99.99 percent. There also is some doubt about the accuracy of these numbers as explained in last month’s article about customer premise versus end of line monitoring (see Communications Technology, November 2000). Essentially, a large portion of the HFC network is invisible to broadband operators. If it is invisible, the availability numbers do not reflect the health of the whole broadband network but only a portion of it. Products are needed that permit operators to delve further into the inner workings of their HFC networks and help them detect, diagnose, troubleshoot, and correct problems before they become service impacting.

Pushing content to the edge

Another challenge with moving to open access is the problem of providing readily available content. As the network pipe that connects individual users to broadband increases, the availability of content at the networks’ edge becomes paramount. This problem has plagued many popular Internet sites as they quickly discovered that providing a single web site for the world to access is unachievable. Instead, the best method of providing content is to push it down to the far reaches (or edges) of the network so it can be cached as close the customer as possible.

For broadband providers, this means placing content in the headends and distribution hubs. Traditional broadband HSD actually was designed with this in mind, placing numerous Internet services extremely close to customers. However, open access may pull this content back away from customers and place it at more distant service provider facilities.

For example, in order for multiple service providers to offer e-mail to customers, each would need to place an e-mail server in every broadband operators’ headend—an unlikely solution because broadband providers would not be willing to give up the floor or rack space to facilitate this (some don’t even have the available space).

Pushing content further up from the networks’ edge forces the rest of the network to handle more capacity while juggling critical service quality, scalability, and redundancy issues. As a result, solutions are needed to enable completely open access to different service providers without extending the content beyond its optimal reach.

All broadband providers can benefit from open access because it allows them to specialize in taking care of their customers while managing their service providers, bandwidth, and network reliability. Best of all, open access completes the vision of broadband by placing new service activation on the open market and making bandwidth available for any new startup that wants to become part of broadband.

Stay tuned...

Next month, we’ll be back to address the problem of managing the connectivity associated with open access. We’ll introduce some of the hurdles that you’ll need to negotiate and how you can begin preparing for a more complex infrastructure.

Bruce Bahlmann is senior architect for Alopa Networks. He may be reached via e-mail at .

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