August 1996 -- Volume 8 Number 5
The newly formed Enhanced Services Deployment Working Group (ESDWG) met for the first time at CableLabs' Summer Conference in Keystone to establish objectives and to assign the sub-groups necessary to accomplish them.
The Group, chaired by Tony Werner, vice president of engineering for Tele-Communications Inc. along with Doug Semon, director of network operations for CableLabs as staff liaison, is focused on developing a series of working guidelines for cable system managers and technical staffs who want to learn how to best launch new broadband applications such as high-speed data, telephony and interactive services.
Four working sub-groups were established at the Keystone meeting: Physical Plant, chaired by Del Heller of Viacom Cable; Network Operations Centers, chaired by Serge Rochette of Rogers Engineering; Headends and Hubs, chaired by John Linebarger of Comcast Cable Communications Inc.; Customer Premise Equipment, chaired by Paul Gemme of Time Warner Cable; and Training, chaired by Bruce Catter of Chambers Communications Corp.
Ultimately, Werner and the Enhanced Services Group plan to publish a series of "living manuals" that help cable system-level employees understand the realities of deploying digital services.
Topics that will be addressed in the manuals include network architecture, headend sizing, powering, interconnects, system maintenance and customer service, among others. Bandwidth management and component-level concerns that affect upstream signal performance also will be covered.
Many of CableLabs' member companies are already very active with enhanced services, like high-speed data and telephony. Others are in the initial stages of offering digital video services. It is this base of experience that the ESDWG will draw upon for the deployment manual.
Many more systems want to launch these enhanced services by the end of the year, but are unsure how to begin or what their choices are. It is the latter category that the Enhanced Services Group is most sharply targeting for the resources it will provide, says Werner.
"I'm quite sure there are a lot of systems out there that would really benefit from a definitive manual style approach as to how to launch these services, and we intend to provide that for them," said Dr. Richard Green, Chairman and CEO of CableLabs, adding that "it benefits all of our member companies at the system level as well as the cable industry as a whole."
While sub-committee chairs have been named and initial outlines of work have been defined, the Enhanced Services Group is still actively seeking more participants from CableLabs' member companies, according to Werner. For further information on how to get involved, contact Doug Semon at (303) 661-9100.
Accelerating Technology Deployment -- Keystone, Colorado
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More than 225 people attended CableLabs' annual Summer Conference held in Keystone, Colorado, July 22-24. The conference was titled Accelerating Technology Deployment and was chaired by Don Dulchinos, CableLabs director of business development and technology transfer.
The CableLabs Enhanced Services Task Force also held its organizing meeting (see separate story) and several other CableLabs groups met, including the High-Speed Data working group.
A key presentation of the conference came from CableLabs' Bob Cruickshank, director of data applications, in a report on CableLabs' high-speed data initiative.
Cruickshank reported that testing has found that cable modems provide the highest burst data capacity of currently viable networks. The high burst capacity is a very important issue because it allows the cable modem network to deliver large quantities of data more quickly than other competing technologies (such as ISDN) while efficiently sharing the network among multiple users. This means that the response time for each user will be much better when accessing rich content, such as downloading graphics on the Web.
The report also noted that currently available cable modems all were found to work and all greatly exceed customer expectations.
And, Quality of Service does not degrade noticeably even with several hundred simultaneously active users on a network segment. These users may be accommodated on one 6 MHz data channel. With burst capability mentioned above, this means that cable customers could consistently receive data at speeds of several megabits per second, Cruickshank said.
In addition, testing has found that the cable industry's hybrid fiber coax (HFC) architecture is superior to point-to-point architectures for multicast and broadcast data and that nodes in this HFC architecture may be subdivided in the frequency domain long before a physical reconfiguration is required.
This means that network quality can be maintained as the number of data customers grows, without physically reconfiguring nodes to subdivide groups of users. Network capacity can be expanded by providing additional data channels in unused portions of the spectrum.
Cable modem deployment was the topic of the conference's first session, a panel discussion chaired by Dr. Jerry Bennington, a visiting executive at CableLabs. Those on the panel were Ron Smith, director of operations for Motorola Multimedia Group; Jeff Ben, product manager of interactive broadband products for Hewlett-Packard Home Products Division; and LANcity President and CEO Rouzbeh Yassini.
The next panel was on digital set-top boxes and was chaired by Dr. Rich Prodan, senior vice president and CableLabs chief technical officer. Speakers included Jeff Hamilton, director of technology and business development with General Instrument; Enrique Rodriguez, MMDS technology project manager with Thomson Consumer Electronics; and Dr. Paddy Rao, executive director for research and development with Hyundai Electronics America's Digital Video Systems Division.
CableLabs senior member of technical staff in the Engineering Department Craig Owen moderated a final panel on telephone services over HFC. Panelists were John Frederick, director of product marketing with ADC Telecommunications Inc.; Jon Grimes, vice president and general manager of the Network Access Division of Tellabs Operations Inc.; and Mike Wearsch, vice president of sales for Antec Digital Systems.
The morning of July 23 focused on data services and included Cruickshank's presentation along with an update on the cable industry cable data specification process. This review was presented by Michelle Kuska, director of network technology with TCI Technology Ventures. Cablevision Systems vice president of technology Wilt Hildenbrand next discussed the cultural change that cable operators need to consider as their technical personnel move into an active reverse path environment.
Culminating the morning was a panel on modem field deployment issues. Doug Semon, CableLabs director of network operations, moderated the session that included as speakers Nick Hamilton-Piercy, senior vice president of engineering and technology at Rogers Cablesystems, Ltd.; Del Heller, vice president of engineering at Viacom Cablevision; and Tom Staniec, director of network engineering at Time Inc. New Media.
Dr. Sadie Decker, senior vice president of advanced information technology with TCI Communications, gave a presentation highlighting the increased importance of operations support systems for cable. She was followed by TCI Engineering vice president Tony Werner who discussed costs of return path upgrading and also by Prodan, who talked about plant proofing issues.
The day closed with presentations on the so-called V-chip from Professor Tim Collings of the School of Engineering Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada and by Bennington.
July 24 opened with a series of reports on competitive and economic issues from Richard Hutchinson, vice president of corporate affairs and advertising from Continental Cablevision; Dr. David Reed, vice president of strategic assessment at CableLabs; and Sharon E. Gillett, a principal in Victory Research.
Comcast vice president of strategic planning Mark Coblitz moderated the next session which dealt with telecommunications services. Speakers were Neil Abramson, program manager for HFC Telephony for Time Warner Cable, and Jason McLaurin, a senior engineer with Sprint Spectrum.
Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Cross Industry Working Team, delivered a keynote before lunch and was followed in the afternoon by a series of speakers focusing on Internet services strategies. The speakers included Paul Mockapetris, director of engineering for @Home; Sean Callahan, vice president of local services for Time Warner's Excalibur Group; and Dan Torbet, network operations manager for Jones' Internet Channel.
A session on content on the World Wide Web followed, including as speakers Roger Keating, vice president of on-line services with Comcast Cable, and Sharleen Smith, director of new technology with USA Network.
The conference closed with presentations from Greg Sullivan, business development manager for Microsoft's Public Network Business Division, and Erik Smith, enterprise segment manager for Sun Microsystem's JavaSoft company.
Update on CableLabs' Web Initiative
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As part of a high-priority 1996 initiative, CableLabs' World Wide Web team is hard at work expanding the Labs' CableNET® site to serve as a gateway to an expanding cable industry presence on the Web, and improving its CableLabs site as a technology transfer vehicle for its member companies.
CableLabs launched its Internet mission in 1993 with an Internet demonstration at its Summer Conference in Breckenridge, Colorado. "Now, this effort is one of the Labs' chief strategic initiatives for 1996," remarked CableLabs president and CEO Richard R. Green.
The Web initiative encompasses CableLabs' two existing Web sites, with plans to create two additional sites in the next year. The CableNET® site http://www.cablenet.org has grown into the premiere, one-stop clearinghouse for the cable industry, according to CableLabs' director of business development Don Dulchinos, who is coordinating Web efforts at CableLabs. The expanded site already features links to various industry related companies and organizations, including regulators, programmers, vendors, and consortium members. Several months ago, CableLabs launched an outreach program to industry related companies and organizations to aggregate the industry's technological expertise and information for presentation on the site. NCTA, Cable in the Classroom and CTAM are among the organizations that have taken advantage of CableLabs' offer of assistance. CableLabs actively promotes the CableNET® site as the gateway to the cable industry.
CableLabs continues to use its other Web site http://www.cablelabs.com as its traditional corporate location with an emphasis on the group's publications, members-only discussion area and technical reference areas. Two recently activated features of that site are the CableLabs High-Speed Data Working Group site and a set of pages devoted to CableLabs' most recent project, the Enhanced Services Deployment Group headed up by Tony Werner of TCI and CableLabs' director of network operations Doug Semon. "I expect the ESD site to expedite the project significantly by providing easy, fast access to draft documents and information on a timely basis," said Semon. In addition, the Request for Proposals for participation in the CableNET® '96 demonstration at the Western Cable Show was also released in electronic form on the Web site simultaneously with its mailing to interested vendors.
CableLabs' Webmaster Lyne Yohe is continually enhancing and upgrading the CableLabs and CableNET® sites. Yohe's explorations in particular may serve to assist CableLabs' member companies in introducing new capabilities to their Web sites, including event ordering and other customer service features.
CableLabs has also designed its evolving Web initiative to include an industry showcase and incubator for new Internet technologies. CableLabs' visiting executive Jerry Bennington and Don Dulchinos recently hosted the new media specialists from several cable programming networks for a productive roundtable discussion of ways CableLabs may facilitate the delivery of new services over its member companies' networks. The group agreed to follow up on several ideas for joint efforts, and CableLabs will establish an e-mail reflector to keep the discussion going. Further, representatives from cable networks along with such leading Web companies as JavaSoft (Sun Microsystems) and Microsoft were featured at this year's CableLabs Summer Conference.
The CableNET® site will ultimately provide CableLabs with a vehicle for incorporating rich Web content into the high-speed data modeling being undertaken by the Labs High-Speed Data Test Program and High-Speed Data Working Group. Team members recently traveled to @Home and Microsoft offices to further investigate joint opportunities.
Future plans for the CableLabs Web initiative will include partnership arrangements with the vendor community to facilitate the ability of cable industry representatives to find their way to the most relevant locations on the vendors' own Web sites.
For more information about the initiative, contact Don Dulchinos (d.dulchinos@cablelabs.com). For information about construction of Web sites or creating hypertext links to CableLabs sites, contact Lyne Yohe (l.yohe@cablelabs.com).
Copyright © 1996 Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. All Rights Reserved.