PHILADELPHIA – The talking about reclaiming analog and shifting channels to digital is about to end – and the heavy-lifting is about to begin.
Comcast COO Steve Burke says cable desperately needs more room for digital channels like more high definition and additional ethnic channels, as well as DOCSIS 3.0. In the States DirecTV claims over 100 HD channels and is the clear leader here. “(Second), is not a place we want to stay forever,” said Burke during the opening general session.
“You can’t stop consumer trends,” added Charter CEO Neil Smit, about the growing numbers of high definition sets being sold, so all that bandwidth-enhancing technology is about to be rolled out. “That means heavy lifting for folks in this room,” he added.
Part of the overall trend – and increased need to transition as many analog services to digital – is the U.S. broadcast transition deadline of February 17, 2009. That’s the analog OTA broadcast shut-off date and MSOs and broadcasters are working together to inform viewers the change is coming and to educate them on what they must do. Canada’s deadline is August 31, 2011 and CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told the industry this week it is moving at too slow of a pace and should now be educating consumers and viewers.
The transition, say the American programmers and operators, is an opportunity for the industry to convert some OTA-only homes to digital cable – and maybe phone and high speed Internet, too. Just wait until that shut off day though. Call volumes “will be higher than usual,” most figure…
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“I don’t know what I would do if I was the general manager of GM’s SUV division… look for a new job, I guess,” added Burke, who noted the TV industry has largely been unaffected by past economic slowdowns – unlike the auto industry.
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Comcast is testing three “protocol agnostic” ways to try and manage bandwidth and mitigate the enormous amount of resources consumed by just a few of its broadband customers. Two or three percent of its customers can use over half the capacity on the network, with P2P traffic accounting for up to 70% of the traffic on the Comcast pipe.
Werner referenced Bell Canada’s choice to do “deep packet inspection” so that it knows what it P2P traffic and what isn’t – and to slot it into its own lane, limiting what applications like BitTorrent can consume. Comcast doesn’t really want to do that, said Werner and it consulted the likes of Google, BitTorrent and other Internet companies to try and figure out a solution.
The most a single user Werner has seen consumed is 4.3 terabytes per month – which works out to about 30 DVDs of information downloaded per day.
Cox Communications CTO Chris Bowick brought his own numbers to show why new ways to manage IP networks are required. One customer recently downloaded 1.7 terabytes of data, which is about 377,000 songs or 1,883 hours of video.
“That’s a lot of porn,” said session moderator and industry consultant Leslie Ellis.
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Videotron is deploying Aurora Networks’ Fiber Deep products as the Montreal-based MSO rolls out the next generation of their network architecture, positioning it for unlimited consumer bandwidth. This network will be deployed throughout the Greater Montreal Area, passing 1.8 million homes.
Aurora’s Fiber Deep eliminates RF actives from the network so that operators will typically halve their power costs and quarter their operational costs while gaining a ten-fold increase in narrowcast bandwidth per home, says the manufacturer. “Aurora’s optical transport product line has many unique aspects, such as patented digital return, an Essential Features Node, and the Light-Plex product family, which together enable key design advantages and flexibility for Fiber Deep deployments,” says the company’s press release.
www.aurora.com
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While TVC’s folks were highlighting some of their house brands like Maxcell and Marathon, the Canadian division is still buzzing over its move to a brand new home in the Greater Toronto Area. The company consolidated three locations into one 50,000 sq.-ft. office/warehouse combination at Major MacKenzie and Highway 404 in Markham, at 280 Hillcrest.
www.tvccanada.com
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With network reliability as the buzzword at the 2008 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Corning Gilbert president and CEO Kathryn Murphy says her company is pushing training, training, training. Connectors need to be the most trouble-free component of the network, she said, because one bad connector can wreck the consumer experience. So, MSO technicians must be well trained on how to properly install the current generation of connectors.
