By Lynn Greiner
MARKHAM – Twenty years ago, the cable television industry spent billions building out the networks that have served us to this day. Over the years, they’ve been renovated, modified and upgraded, but the underlying hybrid fibre coax (HFC) architecture hasn’t fundamentally changed.
And now, faced with the increasing demands for bandwidth, both upstream and downstream, the industry has to look at re-architecting its networks just to keep up, said Ian Oliver, CEO of Versant Solutions Group.
But unlike 20 years ago, when there was one architecture that everyone adopted, today there are many choices, each with its benefits and drawbacks, technically and financially. Versant, founded by cable industry veterans who understand the challenges, has built software that automates the process of coming up with a preliminary design that will work, can be deployed, and is costed out.
“The reality is that there’s no way humans can respond with the necessary quality of information or quantity of information that senior management needs in order to make the kind of billion-dollar decisions they have to make,” Oliver (right) said. “There are just too many variables now.”
Its technology has now been proven in pilots with two major North American cable operators.
After Versant completed a project helping with the geospatial information system database mapping out its outside plant network, New York-based cable TV giant Mediacom Communications, the fifth largest in the U.S. based on the number of video customers, licensed Versant’s technology, and is now deploying it.
“Interestingly, we found that by doing what we do, we also help the downstream process, which is going from a preliminary design into actual construction drawings and getting the network built, and saving time that way, and becoming part of the business-as-usual practice of small network engineering projects and network improvement projects,” Oliver noted.
“So with Mediacom, we’re going to focus first on serving senior management, which the most senior Mediacom person on our account calls ‘having the whole company in a bag’.”
But Mediacom, which focuses on serving smaller cities and towns, wants to do more. Once it has a baseline architecture, it wants to try different architectures in various markets to see whether they are more cost effective in that situation than the baseline. For example, a city with suburbs will probably use a different network architecture or philosophy of network design than a rural area with only 30 households per mile of plant.
Mediacom also wants to quickly create multiple preliminary designs, complete with bills of materials and cost estimates, for each footprint, so they can be presented to management for a decision, said Oliver.
“We’ll do 100 nodes to a given network design or network architecture requirement, in between half an hour and a day.” – Ian Oliver, Versant
There are real world benefits to the automated design and costing, he added. The cable industry thinks of its networks on a node-by-node basis, so a company like Rogers has between 10,000 and 20,000 node serving areas, and with the new architectures, they will end up with new nodes within those original serving areas.
“The human effort required to do preliminary design for, say, 100 of those existing node serving areas for any new network architecture can range from a day per node to two days, three days per node,” he said. “So for 100 nodes, you’re looking at a serious investment of time and energy, which cable companies will make when they have to, but they often don’t have the people and they don’t have the time, so they’ll make the decisions on less information than they might otherwise have, because they don’t have a choice.
“We’ll do 100 nodes to a given network design or network architecture requirement, in between half an hour and a day.”
And those designs, built using advanced algorithms and some AI techniques, are consistent with what an experienced network engineer would create. Oliver said that Versant measures everything, so it knows that the design is technically valid.
“There’s no Friday afternoon corner cutting, there’s no, ‘I don’t really care, I’m just gonna guess’, there’s none of that,” he said. “So we’re essentially taking the naturally occurring human inconsistency out of the process.”
