April 2008

The NCTA conducted an interesting form of outreach last week. After apparently reading a number of unflattering and possibly inaccurate reports on switched digital video’s impact on CableCARD retail devices, the association put out the word that it would conduct a conference call briefing for any bloggers and journalists interested in discussing the topic. The call happened on Friday and it was truly a party of industry trade folk. Among the people I know were on the call: EngadgetHD, Cable Digital News, Multichannel News, IP and Democracy, TV Technology, Envisioneering, HD Guru, Gizmo Lovers, and Zatz Not Funny. And other than someone who treated us all to loud hold music (participants’ phones were not muted), everyone behaved pretty well.

Digression aside, there wasn’t much in the way of news on the call, but I still applaud the NCTA for holding an open forum. More interesting to me than the NCTA’s presentation were the questions that came after it. Here’s a sample (paraphrased) with the NCTA’s answers (also paraphrased). The entire recorded conference call is also available. Call 1-800-475-6701 and enter access code 920821.

Sampling of Q&As from the 4/25 NCTA conference call:

Q: Given the issue of having no 2-way communications in today’s retail CableCARD devices, why doesn’t the cable industry support DCR+?
A: The same problem exists with DCR+ as with one-way CableCARD devices in that consumers don’t get access to all the cable services they expect. DCR+, for example, won’t receive certain existing services like Time Warner’s StartOver and LookBack, not to mention future applications.

Q: What assurance can you give that Tru2way won’t be superseded by something else in three or four years, making consumer hardware obsolete?
A: Cable operators are putting Tru2way in their own devices so they’re not likely render Tru2way obsolete when they have so many set-tops with it in the field.

Q: Given the issues with switched digital video, why doesn’t the cable industry just move to all-digital like Verizon to reclaim bandwidth?
A: The cable is industry is much bigger than Verizon with a lot more existing analog customers. The transition is going to be much more difficult.

Q: PC companies and portable media player companies have difficulty with the CableLabs certification process, particularly when their headquarters are in places like Shanghai, rather than Boulder, Colorado. How do companies figure out how to work with CableLabs?
A: The CableLabs licensing and certification process is open to anyone who wants to participate, and CableLabs wants more companies to get involved. With all the innovation and energy from some of these CE companies, it seems it would be possible for them to make contact with CableLabs without getting 150 people in a room for a CableLabs event in Shanghai. Several cable industry CEOs have even gone to Japan and Korea to reach out to the Asian CE market. It could be a two-way street.

Q: Will there be any kind of requirement for operators to tell subscribers which channels will be on a switched network?
A: Yes, generally operators have to give thirty-day notice when there’s any kind of programming change.

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As referenced yesterday, I sat down with a Motorola exec recently to get an update on the femtocell market. One of my big takeaways from the conversation was that the market varies widely from region to region. That shouldn’t be a surprise given the landscape of the mobile industry, but still the differences were far greater than I had realized. Here’s a look at some of the geographic disparities.

Europe
European carriers are pushing femtocells (many trials this year) as a way to drive new revenue from the use of 3G services in the home. After spending money to buy up UMTS/3GSM licenses, carriers would like more return on the investment, and they see opportunity to extend voice and data revenues with better network coverage indoors. Of course Europe is not really a single entity, and deployment challenges, particularly regulatory ones, vary from country to country. In France, for example, if an operator acts as a wireless carrier for a subscriber, that operator can only provide integrated gateways – in this case gateways that combine femtocell functionality with Wi-Fi routing – if it is also the ISP for the subscriber. Integrated gateways certainly make the most sense from a consumer perspective. The fewer boxes, the better. But in France there will likely be a lot of standalone femtocells deployed.

Meanwhile in Russia (which is considered at least partly European), new regulatory guidance suggests all Wi-Fi capable devices may have to be registered with the government. That could certainly throw a kink in femtocell plans. READ MORE

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Timed to coincide with a Motorola customer event in San Diego this week, Motorola announced today the availability of its new line of VDSL2 gateways. We saw a sample gateway back at CES, but three versions of the product have now been officially released into the wild. The line of gateways is called the Motorola Netopia 7000 Series. Based on three different chipsets, the gateways offer integrated Wi-Fi and significant remote management capabilities. Through Motorola’s NBBS service management platform, operators can remotely manage not only the gateways themselves, but also IPTV set-tops connected to the gateways.

As background, Motorola is currently the leader in the (admittedly tiny) VDSL consumer premise equipment (CPE) market. That market is set for big change this year as operators make their upgrades from ADSL to VDSL. For the public at large VDSL means broadband speeds up to 100 Mbps at close range, a significant improvement over the ADSL2+ max of 24 Mbps.

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I’ve gotten more than few friendly nudges lately for an update on the switched digital video (SDV) tuning resolver. The Motorola device is now officially called the MTR700 and it just came through a CableLabs interop with flying colors. Next the product will be submitted to CableLabs’ Cert Wave 60, and then it will be on display (functional and static demos) at the Cable Show in New Orleans.

Hard to believe a cable product could go through testing this quickly, but consumer CableCARD devices have made the technology a priority.

A few points of context:

• Cable operators don’t want to drive subscribers away because they can’t access certain channels on their retail CableCARD devices, hence the reason the industry has moved so quickly on the tuning resolver
• Operators have significant SDV plans for 2008
• SDV is a good thing! It means more capacity for, among other things, high-def TV channels

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