Attention Vendors: The deadline for submitting applications for BGR's Fourth Annual Diamond Technology Reviews is Feb. 29. Dedicated to independent review and recognition of the industry's latest standout products, the program's results will be announced concurrent with SCTE's Cable-Tec Expo in June. For more info on "the Diamonds" and to download forms, visit
www.broadbandgear.net/diamond-reviews.cfm.

Broadband Gear Report Feature for February 7, 2008

Toward the Anynetwork

By Laura Hamilton, Broadband Gear Report

Any service, at any time, on any device: That holy trinity of networking has become cliché long before it has become reality. So, it was both grounding and sometimes unpredictable to hear to cable's brain trust talking about the realities of building the hyperconnected network as they gathered at SCTE's Emerging Technologies Conference in Los Angeles last month. In the end, a wide array of potential solutions took center stage, promising various levels of scalability, agility, flexibility and of course, cost efficiency.

Cisco Systems Software Architect Alon Bernstein made a proposal for DOCSIS 4.0 in what he called "the best of both worlds" - DOCSIS and PON (passive optical network). He had to remind the audience to suspend its disbelief. "This is a presentation that focuses on how to provide PON services to an MSO network. It does not focus on the why," he said. Bernstein stressed that while migrating from an HFC net to a pure fiber plant is not easy or obvious, there are certain cases where the need for PON is clear: greenfields, upgrades, acquisition and business customers. Only time will prove out if these "PON islands" will grow to one day replace the HFC plant.

IPv6 Acceleration

Sandeep Sharma, senior architect, PacketCable at CableLabs reviewed the PacketCable network architecture and a transition strategy to IPv6. IPv6 may be coming sooner than most may expect, Sharma said, but the good news is that CableLabs has collaborated with the vendor community to ensure that specs support a smooth transition. Sharma outlined various aspects of the transition process, including interworking between administrative domains supporting different IP versions. He concluded that PacketCable and IMS are fully equipped to handle IPv4 and IPv6 and various related scenarios.

At the Edge

The management of edge resources is currently a hype-laden topic, but Doug Jones, chief architect at BigBand Networks steered clear of the time-worn marketing whir and focused on the engineering fact that two architectures are emerging in the space: global session resource management (GSRM) and edge resource management (ERM). The first is a more distributed management scheme that typically uses both session managers and session resource managers, which allocate and autonomously manage universal edge QAM resources. ERM, on the other hand, is a more centralized management scheme that usually uses external SDV and VOD session managers that interact through a single edge resource manager that manages edge assets.

Jones said that having two competing architectures will benefit the cable industry as each strives to develop new and innovative answers to common issues.

New Breed of CMTSs

John Chapman, Cisco fellow and chief architect, took on the future of next-gen M-CMTSs. He considered a wide variety of architectures and rather than define just one, he stressed "all options are on the table."

"As a vendor we know how to make any of these NG CMTS architectures work, and, of course, some may work better than others," he said. "As members of the marketplace, we need to pick the timeframe. When does the industry need a 20 Gbps to 100 Gbps CMTS?" He concluded that the DOCSIS community has to pick one NG architecture because while small variation may be tolerable, big ones obviously won't.

Hosted and Managed VoIP Services Enterprises are recognizing the benefits of hosted and managed VoIP services, which simplify their communication and IT infrastructures and offer lower rates through the provider's large-scale IP and peering infrastructure. However, quality and reliability concerns are slowing adoption. To address these concerns and win enterprise business, VoIP providers often back their offering with service level agreements (SLAs). To the operator, maintaining service quality and responding quickly when issues arise, are fundamental to meeting SLA requirements. In the white paper available here, Tektronix explains how providers can develop remote troubleshooting and preventive monitoring strategies to meet these goals. DOCSIS 3.0 The opportunities for cable ops provided by DOCSIS have been pretty much by the numbers as in DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and now DOCSIS 3.0. Version 1.0 got the data ball rolling; 1.1 added a number of features, including QoS, more robust scheduling, packet classification and other enhancements that facilitate voice services; 2.0 increased upstream throughput; and, now, 3.0 is here with significant jumps in both upstream and downstream speeds. Learn about the upside and downside for the access network in this paper by Cisco's Bob Loveless and Ron Hranac, which is available at here.

Agility in an Evolution

An agile optical system can result in big economic benefits to operators, but this type of network pushes the technical specs of optical modems and makes it hard to preserve the benefits of a 10 G network. Nortel Member of Scientific Staff Michel Belanger tackled that issue in his presentation "Retaining Network Agility in the Evolution to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps." To deliver on the economic benefits, Belanger suggested that the industry needs to consider radically different modem designs. "Dual polarization QPSK exhibits similar properties to that of a 10G modem. In the case of PMD tolerance, it actually surpasses the 10G modem," Belanger wrote in his accompanying white paper. "A 40G transport solution employing dual polarization QPSK provides the capacity benefits of 40G and can be deployed in an agile optical network without compromising the agility value proposition."

To HectoQAM and Back

Those of us who didn't know what the heck a HectoQAM was before this year's ET conference went home with a cool new buzzword in our pockets. Scopus Networks' Adi Bonen defined it this way: "It's really the ultimate universal edge QAM," and he said that the road to personalized video is paved with them. Borrowing heavily from current edge QAM technology, it can surpass and replace current edge QAMs, Bonen said. He reviewed how the HectoQAM not only can make substantial headway toward CAPEX reduction, but even bigger OPEX improvement.

"The HectoQAM revolutionizes the hub forward narrowcast combining network, changing it from a great deterrent to adding or modifying cable plant services, to indifferent to service modifications," Bonen wrote in the HectoQAM paper he co-authored with Harmonic's Gil Katz. "In combination with the surprising spectral efficiency of personalized video, deploying HectoQAM-based personalized video infrastructure may become a good alternative to costly plant upgrades and node segmentation."

Laura Hamilton is editor-in-chief at "Broadband Gear Report." Reach her at laura.hamilton@comcast.net.