RGB Networks released its new high density Broadcast Network Processor (BNP) for grooming and digital program insertion (DPI). The second product based on RGB's Video Intelligence Architecture (VIA), the BNP is designed to enable cable ops to deliver highly targeted and personalized video services.

Housed in a one rack-unit platform, the BNP reportedly delivers "the cable industry's highest density solution for digital video grooming, statistical multiplexing, transrating and DPI." With the ability to process more than 500 video streams in a single rack-unit, the BNP also is said to significantly lower the cost of delivering advanced digital video services.

For more on RGB's bandwidth management efforts, scroll down to the "Feature" below.

World's First Professional Multiformat MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC Decoder

Tandberg Television launched its RX1290 professional multiformat MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC SD/HD decoder that will enable the delivery of both SD and HD content across networks to regional headends. The RX1290 comes with a standard ASI interface and can be fitted with an integrated high performance DVB-S2 demodulator giving an additional potential 30% bandwidth savings. Future interfaces will include IP and COFDM as well.

Engineering, Management and Training Services

SCTE Reveals Board Election Results

They will begin their two-year terms at SCTE's Cable-Tec Expo 2006, which will take place June 20-23 in Denver.

WiFi/WiMax

ADC and Aperto Pen OEM Agreement for WiMAX

ADC entered into an OEM agreement with Aperto Networks to supply its family of WiMAX products as the Digivance WMX product family. The Aperto portfolio includes the first carrier-grade base station certified by the WiMAX Forum.

The Digivance WMX 5000 hardware is based on Aperto's PacketMAX technology and complies with the ATCA (Advanced Open Telecom Platform) open standard that incorporates advances in reliability, availability and serviceability for carrier grade, high-speed telecommunications.

Transport Platforms and Solutions

New Wireless Over HFC Team: Narad and MediaCell

Narad Networks and MediaCell announced the availability of their combined wireless solution for delivering wide area wireless services via the HFC net. The two companies' products combine to deliver a secure channel resistant to snooping with the QoS and tagging requirements needed to support voice and transparent LAN (TLS) services over wireless. Narad's Ethernet over coax solution opens up the op's existing HFC plant to solve the wireless backhaul capacity problem, and MediaCell's 802.11 based solution corrects the security, provisioning, access and sub management weaknesses present in many wireless offerings.

ARRIS to Offer T1/E1-over-HFC Solution

ARRIS and Telco Systems entered into a reseller agreement for the latter's Cable Services Aggregator (CSA) 9000, which acts as the aggregator, when integrated with its metro Ethernet access platform offers an end-to-end circuit emulation services (CES) to cable ops.

The CSA 9000 will be marketed by ARRIS, allowing cable ops to deliver T1 voice, frame relay and leased line services in the U.S., and similar E1-based services worldwide, over standard DOCSIS infrastructure, without any plant modifications. Deploying the CSA 9000 "will minimize rack space and power consumption, while supporting scalability through a range of aggregation density options for handoff of T1/E1 traffic to the carrier TDM network," according to the companies. The solution utilizes the ARRIS Touchstone Commercial Services Modem (CSM470) with 1 T1/E1 port, in addition to a standard 10/100BaseT Ethernet port.

Next-Gen Voice

VoIP, wireless voice, media gateways, multimedia terminal adapters, call management servers, PacketCable, SIP...

Tollgrade Expands Cheetah Clan

Tollgrade Communications recently introduced the CheetahXD Broadband Assurance Platform. When coupled with the Cheetah family of DOCSIS-based products, the product enables cable ops to remotely isolate VoIP provisioning and performance troubles from an HFC-based test access point.

Feature: Bandwidth on the Run: Part 1

by Laura Hamilton, Editor, Broadband Gear Report

Bandwidth management is a top priority for engineers who want to see their HFC networks gracefully take on today's and tomorrow's bulky advanced services. BGR recently spoke with Ramin Farassat, VP of product marketing, at RGB Networks about what's going right with bandwidth management and what's not so right.

BGR: In your opinion, what are engineers with HFC nets doing right when it comes to bandwidth management? What are they doing that could be hurting them when it comes to bandwidth savings?

Farassat: There are different options and approaches to bandwidth savings. Of course, the eventual move to a fully digital network and complete elimination of analog tier would offer the biggest bandwidth saving potential, but this cannot happen overnight. Meanwhile, engineers have been taking steps in the right direction and are building an architecture that can more easily migrate to full digital, namely the digital simulcast architecture. Although this architecture does not solve the bandwidth limitations issues, it does assure a fully digital content distribution throughout the network and all the way to the hubs and therefore, when the right time comes, the move to digital would be much easier.

Another good step made by some operators is the adoption of switched digital video (SDV) architecture (also referred to as switched broadcast). The move to switched video distribution for the less viewed or popular channels does help with bandwidth savings for the digital tier.

However, some of the existing deployments of this technology are proprietary, which limits the operators' capabilities in network expansion and having a choice of multiple vendors that can offer products for the solution. Fortunately, RGB and a number of other vendors are now working together to build and offer a fully open, standards-based architecture to address these issues.

Another concern around the current deployments of SDV architecture is that these architectures are based entirely on clamped and bandwidth restricted video streams. This means the digital video received would need to be reformatted (transrated) to fit a specific bandwidth so it can be controlled and allocated to destination QAMs accordingly. This lowers the video quality and also causes less efficiency in bandwidth savings in the SDV environment. The use of natively encoded variable bit rate (VBR) video in this architecture alleviates both of these issues and offers best video quality and maximum bandwidth efficiency.

BGR: RGB materials say that some existing video processing technology "lacks the performance, density and scalability required to support the emerging and expanding environment." Would you expand on that?

Farassat: Consider two specific architectures, the VOD and SDV, where the content is directly sent to specific subscribers who request the content. Unlike the standard broadcast environment where the same video stream or channel is broadcasted to all subscribers, in a VOD or SDV environment, each stream is sent as a unicast stream to a specific subscriber's set-top box.

The current video processing equipment has been designed to fit the needs of today's broadcast model. Few streams sent to thousands or millions of homes — therefore this equipment lacks the stream density and cost efficiencies needed to fit the needs of a personalized, on-demand environment in which many streams (thousands or millions) are distributed to many subscribers, on a unicast basis.

RGB's goal is to address these limitations by increasing the density of video processing dramatically while also lowering the cost of deployment of these products. This means by using RGB's technology, operators will be able to perform video processing to their VOD and SDV streams in the same way they do with their broadcast distribution.

For example, they can gain additional bandwidth savings and offer better video quality by applying statistical multiplexing in these environments, or they can increase their ad revenues by applying targeted ad-insertion to each VOD or switched stream delivered. The bandwidth savings capabilities for these environments also means operators would be able to take advantage of the newly freed bandwidth to offer additional services such as HD VOD, or use the bandwidth to support higher number of concurrent subscribers without network upgrades resulting in even more cost savings.

BGR: Let's talk a bit about RGB's new release, the Broadcast Network Processor (BNP). How does it meet video processing demands and how can it affect the way engineers manage the capacity of their nets?

Farassat: Today, operators face the challenges of supporting the constant growth in the number of programming as well as the rising number of high definition channels. Additionally, they face the challenges of delivering many advanced services that require additional bandwidth, high stream processing densities and flexibility.

RGB's BNP product is designed to offer an extremely high density statistical multiplexing, transrating and ad insertion capability, allowing it to fit well in today's architectures while providing the flexibility and scalability required to move towards more targeted and personalized services. This means engineers can start to use the product today to meet the broadcast demands, but when needed use the same product to switch to a more targeted ad insertion architecture, or they can increase the number of programming supported without the need to add new equipment or replace existing hardware.

Additionally, the high-density ad insertion capability of the BNP allows operators to combine multiple ad-zones in a single device and both lower costs as well as simplify the management and operation of the system. When used in conjunction with RGB's SEP product, the two products also help lower the cost of deployment of a digital simulcast environment.

BGR: What about the Adelphia deal that RGB announced back in January? How does the Simulcast Edge Processor (SEP) save bandwidth and pave the way to a fully digital network?

Farassat: The SEP product combines three needed functions in a digital simulcast environment: edge decoding, modulation and upconversion. It offers these combined capabilities at an extremely high density, up to 48 analog channels in a single rack unit device, which simplifies the operations and also lowers the capital cost of deploying a simulcast environment. Due to its capabilities and benefits the SEP has been well received and has been deployed by various large and small cable operators.

In general, a simulcast architecture by itself does not offer bandwidth savings. It lowers the bandwidth utilization throughout the network since the content will only need to be distributed once in digital, rather than both in digital and analog formats. This simplifies the network and allows the operators to eliminate the unnecessary analog equipment used throughout the network. At the hub, the digital content is both sent to digital subscribers as is, and is also converted to analog for the analog subscribers.

One of the big benefits of this architecture is that in order to move to a simulcast environment, operators have to make all programming available in digital, and carry all programs in digital throughout the network. With all content available in digital format, when an operator is ready to switch a system or the whole network to digital, the migration would be faster and simpler.

Advanced Video and Interactivity

Charter Catches the Broadbus

Charter has installed Broadbus Technologies' B-1 Video Server to enable on-demand video to 1.2 million homes in its Southeast Division.

"Since the Broadbus architecture can stream a large amount of content in a very short time, we can provide more time-sensitive content, and the scalability of the platform will allow us to implement a wide range of advanced services for our customers, including virtually unlimited Television On-Demand content," Pragash Pillai, Charter VP of advanced engineering, digital video, says. "Further, the greater stability of the Broadbus platform improves the user experience and supports more timely delivery of on-demand content."

The Digital Home

Set-tops, DVRs, home networking,CPEs, CableHome, integrated cable modem gateways...

Knology Subs Ring Up TV Caller ID

Knology launched its first converged services offering, TV Caller ID, using Integra5's i5 Service Delivery Platform (SDP). The application rolled out last month to the op's residential voice and video subs along the Southeastern corridor, including Huntsville, Montgomery, Lanett, and Valley, Ala; Augusta, Columbus and West Point, Ga; Panama City and Pinellas County, Fla; Charleston, SC; and Knoxville, Tenn.

The i5 SDP enables ops to create and deliver converged communications and personalized IP content services to any device, by integrating Internet, voice, video, and mobile content. The patented technology supports migration to an IMS environment. Its standards-based, distributed architecture can scale to support up to millions of subscribers, and has the processing performance required for real-time delivery of signals and information between data, telephone (public switched and IP), cable TV (traditional and IP) and cellular networks. It also supports multiple set-top boxes, PCs and phone lines per household.

Moto Bags New Chipset for Advanced Set-Tops

Motorola will use Entropic's c.LINK 270 chipset as a key component of the home media networking features of the Motorola QIP and DCT advanced series digital video set-tops. Boxes with embedded Entropic chips will enable multi-room video and content sharing without the need for additional cabling or installations associated with set-up and truck rolls.

CableLabs Goes Vegas

Pace Micro Technology's new Vegas TDC575 SD-DVR digital set-top, with an embedded DOCSIS 1.1 cable modem and DOCSIS set-top gateway (DSG) functionality, has achieved CableLabs Verified for Interoperability status. This follows Pace's achieving CableLabs Verified for Interoperability status for its DOCSIS 2.0 and DSG Tahoe TDC775D HD-DVR box last fall.

The Vegas SD-DVR and will debut it at the upcoming NCTA National Cable Show beginning April 9 in Atlanta. This all-digital, dual-tuner SD-DVR has the capability to grow from supporting existing networks to future networks that include OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) and DSG.

Network Management, OSS and Software

Bandwidth management, tiering, service control switches, provisioning and support

BigBand Nabs U.S. Patent

BigBand Networks was awarded a U.S. patent for its method and system of selecting media streams from multiple sources, and dynamically provisioning them to particular groups of subs. The practice is fundamental to the expanding practice of switching digital video and constitutes the backbone of the BigBand Switched Broadcast solution.

CableMatrix and Active Broadband Assimilate Platforms

CableMatrix Technologies and Active Broadband Networks announced successful integration of their platforms, creating what they call "the first adaptive resource management solution designed specifically for broadband cable operators."

CableMatrix's policy management platform allows ops to implement real-time QoS and bandwidth management. Designed for use with PCMM-compliant CMTS, the ODSP can control QoS in a highly targeted manner, instantly adjusting to bandwidth "hot spots" that arise within the broadband network. Active Broadband's Active Resource Manager offers ops the ability to accurate planning, network optimization and operational automation while protecting existing service revenue and reducing time-to-market for new service introduction.

GCI Revs Up Comverse's Rating/Billing Engine

Alaskan op GCI deployed Comverse's Kenan FX framework to provide convergent billing, customer care, ordering and mediation.

The Kenan FX rating and billing engine supports GCI's wireless, local, long distance and Internet services, and replaces multiple billing and back-office systems. The solution streamlines order management and fulfillment functions, immediately tracks and realizes revenue transactions and supports integration with third-party OSS systems.

Sigma Systems Integrates With Nagravision

Sigma Systems' Service Management Platform and Digital Video Service Package has been integrated to the Nagravision Conditional Access System (CAS). This supports a set of operational use cases including subscriber adds, deletes, suspension, resume, refresh, purge records and credit management. The Digital Video Service Package enables the automated provisioning of subscribed digital TV channels and channel packages with support for PPV, IPPV and pre-paid credit management.

Spotlight

Good Grooming and DPI Practiced By RGB