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Northland Launches VoIP in Carolinas
Highlanders (N.C.) and Clemson Tigers (S.C.) Get SIP System
Cutting-edge technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are not reserved for the most powerful operators. Mid-sized systems are proving that they can get into this game fast enough and without busting the budget.
A case in point is Northland Cable Television, based in Seattle, WA, and rated the 18th largest system in the country with more than 315,000 homes passed. The company recently launched VoIP service in its Clemson, SC, and Highland, NC, systems (roughly 8,000 and 2,500 subscribers, respectively) and is about to launch in Corsicana, TX. The company is rolling out VoiceLine, a SIP-based system by Net2Phone. Opting for a turnkey solution allowed the company to launch quickly with low start-up costs, according to Jack Dyste, senior vice president at Northland.
“We were able to launch in our smaller markets with no headend costs,” he said. “Capital costs under this platform are strictly limited to multimedia terminal adapters. We went into trials with Net2Phone last August and finished on February 1.”
SIP’s Advantage
Dyste said the company insisted on a SIP-based VoIP platform because of its advanced features compared to PacketCable. Chief among them is the Virtual Phone Number, in which voice service is ported to another telephone anywhere in the country, enabling free service to relatives.
Other features include E911, online account management and email notification of voicemail.
Mike Pastor, president of Net2Phone Cable Telephony, said the company designed its VoiceLine product with the small-to-medium cable operator in mind. Running off a centralized switching platform at the company’s home base in Newark, NJ, the system offers a low-cost solution to operators who want to enter the voice market quickly.
Advantage, cable
“We’re able to support multiple cable customers from individualized switching platforms, so economies of scale are achieved for operators of this size,” he said.
Pastor added that within the United States, Net2Phone is focusing almost exclusively on the cable market for voice communications.
“Cable has very strong customer relationships, true last-mile facilities into the home, and they can bundle services and provide greater overall value and discounts to the customer,” he said. “Over time, as they deploy IP into the home, they will start to merge voice, video and data applications that are much more challenging–both technically and economically–for traditional copper wire.”
- Art Cole
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Switched Broadcast is for Real
Results from two trials of a switched broadcast tier for dozens of channels are analyzed in the current issue of Communications Technology. But to understand it you’re going to need to brush up on your statistics and other mathematics.
Zipf modeling, basic regression analysis and power laws all figure into this study by Cox ITV Systems Engineer Nishith Sinha, and BigBand CTO Ran Oz and Chief Architect S.V. Vasudevan.
The reason statistics figure so prominently in this technical analysis is that the efficiency gains offered by switched broadcasting are tied to specifying the oversubscription ratio that currently prevails. Take a certain number of subs on one node that have access to 150 programs but watch no more than 50. For more on what happens when you deliver selected digital programming to nodes only where and when it is actively requested, see the March issue, or check out the CT archives at www.ct-magazine.com.
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In response to our question about “which bump in the night scares you most,’ we received this note (more to come next week):
Three things to remember:
- Cable adds value to our products every day
- None of our competitors handle change and go after opportunity the way the cable industry continues to
- Quadruple Play (Voice, Video, Data and Advertising) is clearly our game to lose.
Our growing list of competitors
At last count, cable had 24 competitors in the four product categories (voice, video, data and advertising). They range from small (Mom and Pop ISP’s) to large (DBS and telco) as well as the nascent (broadband over power lines and fixed wireless video) and entrenched (newspapers, radio, TV, and telco again). With our culture of change management, sunk costs in networks and solid user base, it will be difficult for anyone unilaterally to unseat us in video and data. Jostle, maybe, but not unseat. Voice is just rolling out, but it is a real threat to landline companies already under siege from cell phone companies. Cable advertising may be undervalued, but powerful all the same.
The legal threat
I am more concerned about legislation that could diminish our competitive advantage in current and future product lines, i.e., ‘must carry’ for all XoIP applications, telco-specific language in bids for government contracts, re-drafting of franchise agreements, etc. I am sure that the NCTA has a ten year “competitive threat chart” somewhere in its offices, and I fervently hope that lobbying efforts are being aggressively coordinated at the franchise, county, state and national level to prevent our competitive advantages from being squandered and to secure our future opportunities.
Minturn S. Osborne
VP, Cable Sales
Fine Point Technologies
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SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2005 Registration Is Under Way!
Get your name on the books for Expo today. The Expo ’05 website is now LIVE and at your service. The site will fill you in on all of the big plans for this important event coming in June to San Antonio— http://Expo.SCTE.org.
Attention L&D Professionals: Train Your Eyes on June 14
The SCTE Conference on Broadband Learning & Development is set for Tuesday, June 14, in San Antonio. This is a special event for trainers in the broadband industry, to be held in conjunction with SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo 2005. Get details and register today for the SCTE Conference on Broadband Learning & Development at http://Expo.SCTE.org.
SCTE VoIP Symposium Registration Begins Soon
Don’t miss “SCTE VoIP Symposium: Delivering Voice Today—Leveraging for Multimedia Tomorrow.” It’s set for Thursday, May 5, in Denver. Registration begins soon at www.scte.org. Check the Event Calendar section. Space is limited, so jump on this SCTE professional development, hot-topic opportunity.
DRM to Capture SCTE Live Learning™ Spotlight
Catch the next SCTE Live Learning™ event, when the subject will be “Digital Rights Management—Extending Conditional Access Throughout the Home.” It’s set for Wednesday, March 16. The live, interactive, web-based seminar is free to SCTE members. SCTE Live Learning™ is sponsored by Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Scientific-Atlanta, and Motorola. Get details and register today at http://www.scte.org/events/index.cfm?pID=940.
Vote in the Important 2005 SCTE Board Election
If you have not received your SCTE Board Election 2005 voter packet, please contact SCTE at . Members in Regions 1, 2, 6, 9, and 11 will vote for their Regional Director. All members, regardless of region, will vote for two Director-At-Large candidates. Open your election packet, read up on the candidates, and cast your paper ballot or, better yet, vote online using your ballot control number located in your packet. Candidate profiles and the election booklet also are available online. http://www.scte.org/membership/index.cfm?pID=1190
Nominees Wanted for SCTE Top Member, Hall of Fame, and Safety Awards
Take a moment and put someone in the running for SCTE Member of the Year (sponsored by Motorola) and the SCTE Hall of Fame. Also, SCTE Safety Awards (sponsored by GFC) are up for nominations. http://www.scte.org/news/detail.cfm?ID=330
Who Is Outstanding in Standards?
SCTE is pleased to announce a brand new award that will showcase the standard development talents of an SCTE Standards Program participant. Check out the criteria and nominate someone today for the inaugural presentation of the SCTE Excellence in Standards Award at http://www.scte.org/membership/index.cfm?pID=1191.
Arment, Nobles, Gordon-Kanouff, Sharp...
...Kinsman, Gaillard, Calhoun, Martin, Anderson, and Bergman. Who will follow these past winners as the 2005 Women in Technology Award recipient? Hurry! Nominations close this Friday, March 4. Get details/submit a name at http://www.scte.org/news/detail.cfm?ID=328.
CLC Registration Begins
SCTE Chapter Leadership Conference (CLC) 2005 is set for Thursday through Friday, April 14–15 in Philadelphia. Get details and register today at http://www.scte.org/events/index.cfm?pID=279.
Discover New Opportunities with SCTE’s Career Center
It’s powered by BroadbandCareers.Com. SCTE’s Career Center is part of an expanded Broadband Careers Network offering job seekers and employers greater visibility across a targeted audience in the broadband, telecommunications and IP industries. Visit the SCTE Career Center today! Questions? Call . http://scte.broadbandcareers.com/Default.asp
Purchase Carrier Grade Voice Over IP, Second Edition, by Daniel Collins
Learn about the leading-edge signaling schemes, protocol applications, and quality of service (QoS) techniques that provide carrier-quality Voice over IP (VoIP). This book is in the SCTE Bookstore at http://www.scte.org/acb/stores/2/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=286.
SCTE/CTPAA Offering Broadband Tech Crash Course
It’s set for Sunday, May 1 in Washington, D.C. Learn more and register at http://www.ctpaa.org/registration.05.shtml.
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Matt Bell
Systems Need Single View of the Customer
SCTE Member Since 1997
Title: Director of High Speed Data Strategy and Applications Development
Broadband background: For the last ten years Matt Bell has held various management positions in the networking and broadband industry, including BellSouth Entertainment, MediaOne, AT&T Broadband and Charter Communications. At these posts he was responsible for field operations, commercial services, customer service operations and network infrastructure. Since joining Adelphia in 2003, he has lead the design, implementation and conversion to a service delivery framework that includes subscriber provisioning, service activation and service assurance. Bell earlier served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant in the Light Infantry.
You came into the HFC world with a data background. How did you learn the RF side of the business? Or did you need to?
Definitely, I needed to learn it. And at that time, Bell South [which was conducting a two-way, HFC market trial] needed me, who was going to operationalize their product, to be RF-savvy. And so I became immersed in the SCTE training curriculum, I spent time being trained on RF signal level meters, and I went to the field and did well over 300 installations by myself, and became a certified SCTE broadband installer.
How is that relevant today?
I spend a lot of time educating people about tools used to correlat e trouble on the network, between IP and the RF. And that’s really where I find my strength today, in the ability to span both those areas, and bring them together from a tools-creation standpoint.
Where does Adelphia’s Power Tools project stand? Is it complete?
It’d be fair to say that we’re in the third era. It’s an evolving process, without a doubt the service delivery and activation platform has its own life and continues to drive more value into the company.
What’s your view on the state of OSS and cable?
I can’t speak for any other company, but from Adelphia’s perspective, I believe we’ve figured it out. We’ve found a way to disintermediate the billing systems from the restraints that our company formerly had with getting new products and ideas to market. So we have really found agility by centralizing the development of intelligence amongst our systems into a middleware platform. At Adelphia, we use Sigma Systems for that, and their platform has allowed me to integrate applications and share data and intelligence across the applications so that that we really drive value to our subscribers’ experience.
Could you give me an example?
We can allow a subscriber to log into our Adelphia.net Web portal. We do a correlation to make sure that the cable modem that’s on their account is the cable modem that we have in inventory. We authenticate them as a current customer. After that, we allow them to have access to their email or premium services. We check them for acknowledgement on the latest AUP and terms of service, we also allow them to change and modify and update their personal information. And provide us with alternative contact data , which we will use to message our customers about important information in the future.
There are a lot of moving parts, aren’t there?
That characterizes it very well. There have always been so many moving parts: the synchronization of those moving parts has been a quandary for all businesses. We share real-time transactions, and we don’t spend a lot of time replicating data into data stores.
So what’s the principle at work?
We want one view of the subscriber. And how we get it done architecturally is with the philosophy of agility, reliability, and accuracy. Really, we want our systems to have one view of the subscriber. That’s the most important thing. What’s been a challenge is that some of the legacy systems, like our billing environment, don’t lend themselves to the type of communication and transactional speed—or data replication—that allows you to have a single view of the subscriber. So we’ve disintermediated that by having a flow-through provisioning environment that sends transactions from the billing system to the middleware, and then we base our intelligence and build our environments in terms of presence and subscriber knowledge in the middleware.
Has billing’s role changed?
Billing will always be the key data store for us, because that’s what generates revenue, and that’s our final location of truth, relative to the entitlement of a subscriber. But from there we’ve kind of unhinged its importance in the delivery of services.
What has it been like to work at Adelphia over past few years?
The culture that I’ve been exposed to at Adelphia is one of creativity, hard work, and speed. We’ve done more with less time and fewer resources than I’ve seen at any other company so far in my career. And I think that’s happened because of our singular vision. We all understand that the environment is one of success. Working hard is paying off, and it’s a lot of fun, because you see things work.
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