OTTAWA – Serendipitously gathered together on the 10th anniversary of the launch of Rogers WAVE, the first North American high speed Internet on cable service, SCTE-Ontario members heard first hand that if traffic isn’t managed smartly, cable services, VOIP especially, will suffer.
About 100 of the chapter’s 400+ members came together at the Ottawa Travelodge West last Thursday and www.cartt.ca was there.
John Downey, broadband network engineer at Cisco; Tony Faccia, vice-president networks and capacity planning at Rogers Cable; Tom Donnelly, co-founder and v-p sales and marketing at Sandvine; and Lindsay Schroth of research company Yankee Group all made presentations, followed by a panel discussion hosted by Rogers’ Robin McIntyre.
The animated Downey tossed out some seriously hard technical tips on network trouble shooting – real deep stuff – talking about group delay, sweep traces and suckout, among many other topics. “Sometimes if you tap the amplifier connection, (interference) clears up – and that’s a bad thing!” he said.
Interference can come from all kinds of places, he added, mostly from in-home devices. He cited CB radio, HAM radio, radio-control cars, shortwave radio, lousy in-house appliances, walkie-talkies, baby monitors, cordless phones, and meter reading equipment as potential signal-crossers.
He told conference attendees of one recurring signal problem he came across outside of Detroit, which stopped at 11 p.m. every day. Turns out a local welding plant shut down at 11 and until then, the cable network in the area was infested with interference from the arc welding machines – transmitted through an old television in the company’s cafeteria.
Rogers’ Tony Faccia expounded on the fact that all MSOs must have a smart, traffic-managed network, especially with video on demand usage “going up tremendously,” he said.
Faccia showed increases in VOD buys by customers from near nil in 2002 and ’03 to 11 million buys in ’04, a projected 32 million in ’05, and on upwards to nearly 50 million by 2007. Those are a lot of up and downstream signals passing through a network which by then will have thousands of voice customers and far more high definition programming.
Right now, prime time Friday and Saturday nights are the peaks and so far, one week in March posted the largest number of simultaneous streams seen yet, with over 12,400, or 35.9% of Rogers’ server capacity, said Faccia.
With Rogers committing to double the number of on demand titles available from 2,000 to 4,000, major server muscle and a well-managed network is required. And, as HDOD comes on, Rogers “need five times as much capacity to offer it,” he said.
On the Internet side, peer-to-peer file sharing is an ongoing issue, said Faccia and Sandvine’s Donnelly. Ten percent of Rogers subscribers use 80% of network capacity trading music, photos and video. “We will see a doubling of peak downstream traffic every two years,” Faccia predicted.
Bit torrent has become an issue, too – a free web application where users, in the act of downloading music or a video file, immediately begin exporting that file before they are even finished downloading it. It taxes networks something fierce with popular files as the network constantly searches for network resources to make the file up and downloads happen, while they’re already happening.
“You need active control over your network,” emphasized Donnelly. But maybe, he added, it’s time for MSOs to re-think those big bandwidth users. “You need to identify your heaviest users. They are not a problem, though. They are your best customers.”
Then again, he added, 10 of 12 e-mail messages sent today are spam and one in 63 are virus infected.
After lunch and the Cable Games, Yankee Group’s Schroth presented an overview of the North American Internet, VOIP and TV distribution market.
Perhaps surprisingly, she believes that the triple play is already yesterday’s news. “You need the broadband pipe to the home for unlimited play,” she said.
With broadband pipe, applications (i.e.: content) is king. And there are far more than three. “You can deliver a multitude of voice, video and data applications, instead of just thinking of delivering voice, video and data,” she explained. And that brings increased ARPU, which makes company accountants happy.
“The triple play is not the holy grail, but a means to an end,” she added. That end being to attack the telcos’ cash cow and weaken their ability to respond.
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The winners of the Ottawa Cable Games were: 1. Jeff Swan; 2. Marco Demers; 3. Tom Sawyer, all from Rogers Cable.
The overall winners, all of whom have won the right to attend the International Cable Games at the SCTE Convention in San Antonio in June are: 1. Don Becker, Toronto; 2. Scott Stevenson, Toronto; 3. Jeff Swan, Ottawa, all from Rogers.
Becker and Stevenson are automatically in national games, and will get $1,000 from games sponsors Telonix and Power & Tel to attend. Swan is the Ontario Chapter alternate at the Games.
For more information, go to www.scte-ontario.com.
– Greg O’Brien
