IT’S EASY TO FIGURE OUT just what the American cable operators are doing when you travel to conferences Stateside.
The SCTE Cable-Tec show in Denver last month was no different. Network DVR, switched digital, VOIP, analog reclamation and MPEG4 – attendees sure were able to get a handle on what our U.S. neighbours are up to.
But what of Canadian cable plans? Why not ask Rogers Cable senior vice-president network engineering and operations (and the SCTE board’s Canadian rep) Dermot O’Carroll? All new cable concepts and new gear for Rogers passes through his office so if anyone knows where we’re at with certain cable technologies, it’s him.
O’Carroll recently chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien on some of the topics that were top of mind in Denver this year (and for more on SCTE’s Cable-Tec, search Cartt.ca using the term "Denver"). What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: The reason I wanted to talk to you is because of all of what I saw and heard at Cable-Tec in Denver last month. There was a lot of what the U.S. cable companies are doing, but I’d like to get a handle on where Rogers is at with a few of the high profile topics right now. Let’s start with what’s up with switched digital video and your thoughts on that.
Dermot O’Carroll (right): We look at switched digital as one of the tools that are available to enhance bandwidth. There’s switched digital, there’s MPEG4, there’s analog reclaim – all of which you know, are alternatives to a rebuild. But first of all, we’re fortunate in that unlike a lot of the U.S. systems, we’ve become 860 MHz, so we have somewhat more room to breath than some of the U.S. guys.
So, we’ve got more flexibility in terms of which tools we use and in terms of switched broadcast, we’ve had a couple of different vendors products in the lab for a while, getting familiar with the technolo
gy, understanding the architecture, understanding how it works. You know, we think it’s probably a while before we’d need to implement it, which I think is good because the standards need to get sorted out a little bit yet.
GOB: Is it still an immature technology?
DOC: Well, no, the technology can be made to work. But, for example, the big success the cable industry had was with the standardization of DOCSIS through CableLabs. And you know that generated a lot of manufacturers producing product. That drove down the cost curve very rapidly and through standardization, improved the operational capability of the technology. So, you can streamline operations and get efficiencies, etcetera but I think switched broadcast isn’t there yet. There are technologies out there but there are essentially proprietary.
So I would certainly like to see more CableLabs involvement and moving closer to an industry standard.
We’ve been evaluating the technologies that are out there so that we understand them – so that we can know what kind of efficiencies we could get from switching. But fortunately, we’re not under pressure to implement it.
GOB: Is it still at least two years away, from a Rogers point of view?
DOC: In that ballpark – probably 18 months to two years.
GOB: You mentioned a couple of the other bandwidth savers: analog reclamation and MPEG 4. What are your thoughts on those two?
DOC: The obvious difficulty with MPEG 4 is you got a lot of MPEG 2 boxes out there so the real opportunity with MPEG 4 is actually for high-def because you’ve got a smaller population of high def boxes (deployed). If you could get high def boxes with both MPEG 2, MPEG 4 capability today, then you could start seeding the marketplace with them.
GOB: Are any of those available right now?
DOC: No. That’s the issue.
If you talk to the vendors, you’re probably looking, you know Q1 ’07 for those kind of boxes. And when the boxes become available, we would expect to start seeding them in the marketplace so that we would increase the population of MPEG 4 capable boxes, then if and when we needed to, you could take the MPEG 2 boxes, use them as standard def boxes and swap them out with MPEG 4.
Then you get a fairly significant bandwidth reclamation by doing that. We’ve got a lot of HD channels out there now, so, you’ve got four to one (four HD channels in one 6 MHz analog channel) instead of two to one, you’d get quite a few QAMs back.
Analog reclamation is the third leg of the stool and further out where we’ve been growing our digital penetration, we would expect that over time, we’ll grow that to a percentage where the vast majority of say our Tier 3 customers are digital.
GOB: Rogers sounds like its in a pretty good position right now – so there’s no thought to rebuilding to 1 GHz or anything like that?
DOC: No.
GOB: I heard a couple of the U.S. CTOs say they would do that in greenfield areas but not anywhere else.
DOC: What are benefits of having it in a greenfield area unless it’s got a unique lineup or you’re doing something different? So our greenfield areas for the past two years have been passive optical networks. We have no RF amplifiers… in our greenfield areas and we’ve been doing that for a couple of years. I think we were the first to start it.
GOB: So, you’re fibre-to-how-close then?
DOC: In those areas, 60 homes. It’s basically, fibre to the curb and co-ax to the home, and the driver for that is really operational cost savings and more than anything else ‘cause you got no actives in the outside plant.
GOB: You mentioned a little bit about DOCSIS. How close is DOCSIS 3.0?
DOC: There was a fair bit of talk about it at the SCTE where there is some concern that – and it’s more of an issue in the U.S. than here, where you’ve got companies like Verizon and others driving to very high speeds, so there’s pressure on the MSOs to go beyond the capability of DOCSIS. At 256 QAM you get a 38.5 megabit downstream. And I think some of the U.S. MSOs are not using 256 QAM, so if they want to go higher, they need something beyond that, which is what DOCSIS 3.0 promised.
I think DOCSIS 3.0 standard is a bit off yet. They were looking at an interim step, which is – they call it 2.0b which would give you channel bonding in the downstream but not in the upstream.
GOB: What advantages does that give?
DOC: It would allow you to give, say, 100-megabit service in the downstream but it would be asymmetrical because you couldn’t do it in the upstream. If you were in a competitive market where your competitor was offering something like that, you might feel you need to do it.
And you see stuff like that happening in Japan and there’s some talk about Verizon doing something. But you know, that really doesn’t exist in the Canadian marketplace.
GOB: I’ve never heard of Bell or Telus planning something like that.
DOC: No. There’s none at all. So, we don’t see that pressure here. But at the SCTE, the MSOs came out very strongly and reiterated that their interest is 3.0 because there was some talk that if they went to this 2.0B interim, that it would delay 3.0 and I think the MSOs have come out very strongly and said, ‘no; we’re not interested in anything that’ll delay 3.0. We’re interested in 3.0, which gives you channel bonding both in the downstream and in the upstream.’
The opportunity is there for us, in particular for commercial applications. If you want to do 100 megabit to a commercial application, then you also need high capacity in the upstream and 3.0, gives you that possibility. We’re certainly in support of evolving to 3.0. There will probably be some individuals who, because of their competitive circumstances, may do proprietary interim things but I think the general push of the MSOs is to push for full 3.0 capability.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen until probably ’08.
GOB: Where is channel bonding right now?
DOC: You can’t buy systems today that do channel bonding. A number of the vendors have demonstration units; they’re pre-production units, and you know, you can get a pre-production unit for testing and stuff like that. But it’s only channel bonding in the downstream, not on the upstream.
Even if there were going to produce that commercially, it wouldn’t be available until probably first or second quarter of next year and I would think that has little application in Canada. Our interest is full 3.0.
GOB: Switching back to the TV side and – and things that have little application in Canada – I was curious about the cable card…
DOC: OCAP?
GOB: Yes. I haven’t heard of any operator in Canada moving towards those (TVs with cable-card-ready slots).
DOC: The great thing about Canada and OCAP is that we don’t have the same regulatory environment as they have in the U.S. We don’t have the same drive for this. To us it’s an opportunity but we have lots of things to focus on… our voice service, etcetera. So, where we are on OCAP – we’ll definitely be second after the US.
We’re going to let them work out all the kinks in it, see how well they do and we’ll be in an implementation mode rather than a research mode at some point. OCAP looks like it’s a fairly complex thing and we would be quite happy to have them work all the kinks out.
GOB: What about the other hot topic at Cable-Tec, the network PVR? Any interest from your point of view?
DOC: The biggest issue with network PVR at the moment is there’s a whole bunch of legal issues around it. As you know, Cablevision were planning a trial – and it was a pretty conservative trial in terms of the way they were hosting content for individual customers – but they ran into some legal issues and halted the trial…
GOB: The U.S. broadcasters view it as VOD – just by another name. but unauthorized.
DOC: Yes. But it’s not really VOD by another name. What (Cablevision had planned) was a bit remote storage of the content from the customers’ PVR into the network. I think if all the legal issues got sorted out and you could get efficient storage in the network, there are probably economies of scales to be achieved in there for PVR.
But I think it’s the next step after switched broadcast.
Fortunately we have both standard definition and HD PVRs that are pretty popular so, we don’t have a huge drive for network PVR at the moment. We’ve certainly studied the technology and I think it’s feasible but there are so many issues in terms of content and the legal issues.
GOB: Now that you’ve got a lot of voice over IP time under your belt, how have you done with that? Have there been any unexpected technical challenges you’ve had to adapt to?
DOC: No, I mean – it’s gone incredibly well. The network performance has been better than our expectations. With all technology, there are always some minor glitches but nothing of any significance at all. I should touch wood – we’ve network performance that has been fabulous and customer satisfaction seems to be very high with the product…
Combined with the circuit switched portion on a national basis and we’re a fairly large phone company now and one of the challenges, of course, is building the organizational infrastructure to support it and an operations point of view and engineering point of view, etcetera.
But even that’s gone very well.
