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Some broadband offerings are built for (pricing) comfort, it seems, while others are built for speed.
For years, cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) services offered fairly comparable services to end users. Those days are over, and the strategies of the two industries are clear: Cable operators are moving faster, and DSL providers are dropping prices.
SBC has reduced the price of its service?which it co-brands with Yahoo!?to $26.95 per month for the first year. Verizon Communications and Bell South offer services, in some cases, for $29.95 per month. On the cable side, Time Warner, Comcast, Adelphia, Cox and Charter all have increased their speeds.
Squeezing capacity?
From an engineering perspective, the key question is whether the increasing speeds?and, operators hope, the penetration gains they will stimulate?will start to squeeze capacity on networks. In short: If the strategy works, will it expedite rebuilds, upgrades or other bandwidth-enhancing strategies?
The answer is apparently not, at least in the short run.
?I don?t see it as a major issue,? says Dave Pangrac, who heads a consulting firm that bears his name. ?Most operators have built networks to handle a lot of data?They have a lot of capacity available. While they are increasing speeds, it?s still best effort.?
Jeff Turner, Adelphia?s director of product development of high-speed data, agrees. The company has no fears that it will run low on capacity. Its focus, Turner says, is on standardizing its high-speed data products.
For instance, its New England systems had been offering 2 Mbps downstream and 256 Mbps upstream. The New York and Pennsylvania systems, which now are managed with the New England systems, had offered 3 Mbps downstream and 128 kbps upstream. Now the entire company?including those systems?is standardizing on those speeds. The company also is introducing a tier aimed at power users, which features 4 Mbps downstream and 512 kbps upstream.
This new offering and the standardization and increased capacity offerings?essentially, Adelphia is choosing the most data intensive upstream and downstream option?isn?t likely to expedite rebuilds. ?The backbone was made to support [the higher speeds],? Turner says. ?We didn?t see that there needed to be changes there.?
For its part, Cox plans to ?bookend? its standard 3 Mbps service. It has capacity enough to offer a tier with even faster speeds and a low-range tier of 256 kbps symmetrical.
?Three times as many customers are interested in paying us $10-$15 more per month for more features or more speed than customers interested in saving $15 for lower speeds,? Joe Rooney, Cox senior vice president of marketing, says.
ACK filtering
Of course, the industry should benefit from capacity gains brought by DOCSIS 2.0. The standard provides operators with 30 Mbps of upstream capacity.
It is also clear that vendors will try to keep operators free of bandwidth constraints. Texas Instruments is offering one such device, called TurboDOX. In a TCP/IP network, the server awaits an acknowledgement that a packet has been received before it transmits the next packet. If the receipt isn?t received after a predetermined interval, the packet is resent. This resending will go on until the acknowledgement is sent, says Peter Percosan, the company?s director of broadband strategies.
This can lead to problem in both the upstream and downstream directions. On the upstream, there will be additional contention for bandwidth as the cable modem seeks to send numerous acknowledgements for duplicates of the same packet. Downstream bandwidth is wasted simply because multiple versions of the same packet are transmitted.
TurboDOX, according to Percosan, uses a variety of approaches to cut bandwidth requirements, including acknowledgement filtering (ACK filtering). ACK filtering cuts bandwidth requirements by eliminating the need to send acknowledgement packets for all but the most recent version of a packet. This, combined with concatenation and payload header suppression, enables TurboDOX to increase upstream speeds radically, Percosan says.
?Carl Weinschenk
Voice over IP (VoIP) continues to advance, with the Frankfort, Ky., Plant Board being a case in point.
The municipal utility and cable operator is using gear from Arris and Nuera to battle Bell South for residential and business voice customers in its 22,000-home footprint.
The VoIP project took a long time to come together, says Ed Hancock, the Plant Board?s assistant superintendent for telecommunications. The concept of integrating local and long distance telephone services on the cable plant began while the Plant Board upgraded and digitized the cable plant several years ago. That initial upgrade included installation of a DMS-500 switch from Nortel.
Leap of faith
It wasn?t a smooth road, however. ?We had a number of difficulties,? Hancock says. ?One was with the downturn in the telecom industry, trying to work through different vendors coming and going?A lot of research money dried up.?
The initial gateway vendor was Tollbridge, which went out of business. That led to Nuera. The gateway vendor is working closely with Arris, which is supplying Cadant C4 cable modem termination system (CMTS) and Touchstone Telephony Ports to the project.
?We put the unit in place in April this year,? Hancock says. ?It was a leap of faith for us. We had only seen it on paper. So Arris gave it to us on sort of a ?try and buy? program.?
Initially 50 friendly users were provided services, Hancock says. In September, the company put paying customers on the system, he says. There were some bugs. For instance, an issue of inconsistent ringing created some problems for answering machines. Hancock says Arris traced the problem to a configuration file, which was fixed.
The Plant Board hasn?t started hard marketing yet but, through word-of-mouth, is signing ten to 12 customers per day.
Other approches
Meanwhile, the Coldwater Board of Public Utilities in Coldwater, Michigan, launched telephony services using the Internet calling plan from Vonage.
Using session intitiating protocol (SIP) and availing itself of any broadband connection, Vonage doubled its active line base from 30,000 in June to more than 60,000 in November. Armstrong and Advanced Cable Communications are two other operators using Vonage?s hosted service.
While most large MSOs are taking the PacketCable approach, Volo Communications says it is trialing its telephony services with four cable operators in Florida, including Bright House Networks.
Volo uses a distribued, application-switch architecture that promises minimum entry costs and high quality of service (QoS) to operators and other data carriers.
?Carl Weinschenk and Jonathan Tombes
 Back to December 2003 Issue
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