June 2010

Regulatory oversight is a very important check in our government system of checks and balances. However, that doesn’t mean it always works. Two cable industry milestones in the last week illustrate this point vividly.

First, the NCTA reported that the largest US cablecos have now deployed more than 21 million set-tops with embedded CableCARDs. (via Light Reading Cable) Despite that fact, the FCC’s CableCARD mandate is widely considered a failure, and the agency is actively looking for potential alternatives. There is plenty of debate over why the CableCARD hasn’t been successful, but the biggest reason may be that it was just too hard to deploy the technology quickly enough to keep up with other advances in the market.

Example #2: Last week the FCC withdrew another mandate requiring cable operators to include a FireWire connector, or 1394 port, on all set-tops. The reason? Nobody uses FireWire. Industry veteran Leslie Ellis explains it very succinctly in a post over at Multichannel News. After pouring $400 million into 1394 deployments, cable operators have clear evidence that HDMI is the connector people really want.

Ask any cable engineer how many subscribers requested 1394, since the mandate. I did, back in March, of the CTO of a cable company with about 5 million subscribers. His answer? Five. (Five. Out of 5 million. In five years.)

There is a natural conclusion to be reached from these examples. Any further FCC mandates in the cable industry – think home gateway device – should be handed down with caution. The best intentions don’t always produce the best results.

{ 3 comments }

Verizon has announced today a successful test of its 10 Gigabit-per-second XG-PON system, which resulted in symmetrical residential broadband speeds of nearly 1 Gbps. The test used Motorola PON technology, including existing AXS2200 OLTs with both new chassis cards and new ONTs supporting 10GPON.

Here’s more from the press release.

At the customer’s home, the optical network terminal (ONT) received the 10/2.5 Gbps feed and used two data communication ports to simultaneously provide transmission speeds of close to 1Gpbs to each of two PCs inside the home. Combined, the two ports delivered approximately 1.85Gbps in aggregate bandwidth in each direction.

The press release goes on to illustrate the practical use of these speeds by saying that it would take someone “less than three minutes to download a  20 gigabyte, Blu-ray movie over a 1Gbps link… and a business customer using this service could backup data on an online server every night in just a few minutes, as opposed to hours.”

Motorola has a long history of supplying BPON and GPON technology to Verizon for its fiber-to-the-home services. For context, check out this post from 2007, which includes a timeline of Verizon/Motorola PON activities around the telecom company’s FiOS deployments. I’ve also posted another timeline below detailing Motorola’s ONT advances going back to 2001. Click to enlarge.

Please note: this post has been edited for accuracy since it originally appeared.

{ 3 comments }

The added demands of 3D programming were bound to hasten the transition from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, and now Engadget HD is reporting that Comcast will rely solely on MPEG-4 to deliver 3D signals starting in August. At the moment, Comcast transmits ESPN’s 3D broadcasts in both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, but later this summer the MSO will drop the MPEG-2 stream and ask any 3D subscribers not using an MPEG-4 set-top to make the upgrade.

Meanwhile, Motorola encoder shipments suggest that more MPEG-4 broadcasts are on the way. In Q4 of 2009, shipments of MPEG-4 encoders outpaced shipments of the MPEG-2 variety. The MPEG-4 advantage means more content delivered and less bandwidth needed. It also means that DVRs can hold more video per gigabyte of space. Combined with growing hard drives sizes, this is a promising development for DVR households.

One final note – for those operators not ready to drop MPEG-2 just yet, it is possible to continue delivering frame-compatible 3D to older set-tops. Motorola set-top software even makes it possible to address challenges like closed captioning and program guide support, which otherwise can cause problems in frame-compatible transmissions.

{ 2 comments }

As part of a media briefing this afternoon on cable commercial services, one of the Motorola execs on the line unearthed a white paper on using DOCSIS 3.0 for the enterprise from 2009. The stats quoted are now a year out of date, but I still think they’re worth sharing. First of all, SNL Kagan estimated that commercial services for MSOs in the US generated $3 billion in 2008. That doesn’t sound terribly impressive, except that Kagan also projected that number would rise to nearly $10 billion in 2012. Moreover, Motorola was able to corroborate Kagan’s general analysis, reflecting that MSOs in 2009 appeared to be experiencing upward of 20% annual revenue growth from the provision of high-speed data services to business customers.

Cable has long talked about the potential for growth in commercial services, but reality has lagged behind the industry’s vision. That may finally be changing now that residential broadband speeds are approaching 50 and 100 Mbps in some areas thanks to DOCSIS 3.0.

Interestingly, commercial services represent a particularly valuable niche for operators because peak usage times in the workplace directly counter peak usage times for subscribers at home. Nice way to get more revenue from existing infrastructure.

{ 0 comments }