Expo '08: Cable's Braintrust Tackles DTV Transition and Much More

By Laura Hamilton

SCTE's annual flagship event, Cable-Tec Expo, is known for "all-engineering, all the time," so even a major Society personnel announcement had to wait for confirmation until after the show had shuttered up all its technical demos and its 11,000 attendees were home from Philadelphia. The Monday after the event, SCTE officially announced that John Clark, the Society's president/CEO, would leave his post effective July 4.

Marv Nelson, SCTE vice president, professional development, has been appointed interim president/CEO, and is responsible for managing the affairs of the Society until Clark's successor is named. A search committee, chaired by SCTE Board Western Vice Chair Frank Eichenlaub, has been formed and the search will begin immediately.

Despite the changes that were in the works for the Society's staff, the major focus of Expo did indeed remain firmly on cable engineering, with technical insights coming from experts on everything from the broadcast DTV transition to business services to advanced network plans.

Bye, Bye Analog

Given the impending broadcast DTV transition, it was no surprise that there was a lot of chatter on that topic in the sessions and on the show floor.

At the Opening General Session, Comcast's COO Steve Burke said that he viewed the transition as a great opportunity for cable to pick up basic subs, even though many consumers have already got their DTV converter box coupons. Burke speculated that many won't follow through by picking up the equipment at consumer electronics stores, and that 20%-40% of antennas won't work. With that kind of potential, the CEO panel tended to agree that the cable industry should be prepped for an influx of consumers looking to become cable subs for perhaps the first time.

A solid engineering overview of the subject came from TANDBERG Television VP of Technology Matthew Goldman in his presentation, "Preparing for the Broadcast Analog Turn-Off: How to Keep Cable Subscribers' TVs from Going Dark."

"Creating a replacement analog TV signal directly from an ATSC/DTV signal involves many format transformations in order for the video, audio services, closed captions, content advisories and other ancillary data to be received and processed by an analog TV set," Goldman said. He explained how ATSC-to-NTSC converter/receivers placed at the front end of the headend will make it appear to the existing analog plant as if over-the-air analog TV signals were still being broadcast, post the "Great Analog Television Turn-Off" of Feb. 17, 2009.

Down to Business

Another hot topic at Expo was how cable operators can deliver on the promise of business services, especially business-class voice and cellular backhaul leveraging as much of the existing network infrastructure as possible.

Andrew Sachs, director of marketing, service assurance solutions at JDSU reviewed today's most critical cellular backhaul issues and methodologies used to combat them. He pointed out that backhaul, not radio access bandwidth, has become the crucial resource that must be managed for wireless operators. He also explained that the promise of 4G will make Ethernet, microwave and fiber backhaul a necessity to provide affordable, flexible high-bit-rate backhaul services. "Legacy PM models have proven that the proposal put forth by the MEF for Ethernet service PM will ultimately be adopted. It is just a matter of time," Sachs wrote in his technical paper.

Cedar Point Communications Senior Director Chris Gugger took on business-class voice challenges and stressed that because business customers have much higher expectations than residential subs, MSOs need to ensure they think through the entire process from the back-office to sales to service and support. "If a call from my grandmother is dropped, I can just call her back. As an SMB, if you miss or drop a call it could result in a lost sale or disgruntled customer," he said.

The cable op needs to consider how provisioning and billing will be different from residential service, and also must understand that the sales process will be different as well. As an example, Gugger explained how a customer buying a trunk would look for a different sales relationship than someone buying one or two lines. He also stressed that interoperability with CPE ranging from IADs, PBXs and phone sets will become more and more important, and support for this may come from your switch vendor and/or your own lab. Finally, Gugger underlined that it will be crucial to success for techs and tech support reps to be trained and capable of installing, configuring and troubleshooting CPE or simple call features.

Cox Product Development Manager Brian Rose called Metro Ethernet over DOCSIS a "golden MSO opportunity" to leverage the existing network. "But you have to recognize this is a vastly different business model than largely consumer-oriented services such as video, Internet and voice," he quickly added.

Rose concluded that both the CableLabs network-based and the CPE-based solutions are scalable and capable of providing Ethernet over DOCSIS service. "What determines which approach gets adopted by an operator will be the state of provisioning, service management and support infrastructure and the additional services that customers would require in addition to the Ethernet service," Rose stated in the paper he co-authored with Ben Bekele of Cisco Systems. "It is likely that service providers will find use for both options given the disparity of networks and back-office."

ARRIS Senior Director of Solution Architecture and Strategy Mike Emmendorfer tackled the Carrier Ethernet over DOCSIS topic with a proposed target architecture for DOCSIS service providers. "The challenge facing the cable industry is to define a network architecture that enables the full range of MEF-defined Carrier Ethernet service that may be carried over a DOCSIS network infrastructure with the least impact on capital investment and operations, while assuring networkwide readiness, support for end-to-end QoS and service management," Emmendorfer said in his white paper. He went on to review these fundamental challenges and explained the cable industry's Ethernet over DOCSIS architecture choices, including BSoD L2VPN network-based approach, L2TPv3 CPE and Aggregator hybrid approach.

If you'd like to read any of the papers referenced here, and you wonder where your Expo proceedings manual went, dig around in the bottom of your show bag for the CD-ROM. As part of its green effort, SCTE only produced an electronic version of the presentations and collected technical papers. If you didn't attend the show, you can purchase the proceedings at http://scte.org/devams/cgi-bin/msascartlist.dll/ProductInfo?productcd=TS28.

Laura Hamilton is editor-in-chief at "Broadband Gear Report."

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