December, 2002
Making the Most of Your Cable Plant
by Peter Lowten
During a visit to BroadbandPlus, the New Western Show, in Anaheim I had an opportunity to delve into a subject that a number of Independent operators have asked about. With so much concentration put onto the delivery of services over fiber and twisted pair copper, the fact that many ITCs own cable plant is sometimes overlooked.
Can this cable plant be leveraged using new technology without disrupting the normal flow of business? A number of established and start-up companies believe it can. I was fortunate to visit two such vendors at this exhibition, Xtend Networks and Narad Networks. Both produce a range of products, aimed at utilizing the coax portion of the existing HFC cable network to carry bidirectional information above 860MHz. This approach can provide many of the benefits of fiber access solutions at lower cost, and with much faster roll-out – no new trenching!
Narad offers a first generation product that fits between 860 MHz and 1GHz, is said to pass through current 1GHz taps and provides up to 100Mbs of bidirectional data per strand. A new offering making use of 2GHz has just been launched. Xtend in contrast has started beta testing of a product range claimed to work up to 3 GHz, consequently offering even wider available bandwidth, supporting data rates greater than 1Gigabit each way.
The two companies take different technology approaches, and have different solutions philosophies. I will not attempt to analyze them deeply, as to do the companies justice would require a much longer article than is realistic here. It is sufficient to note that for both approaches only the path to the particular customer needs to be upgraded, that equipment is only deployed at current sites in the network, and that all cable drops are left intact. Cable plant technicians should feel comfortable working with this type of solution, as the building blocks are familiar. Biggest concern may be in purchasing test gear and developing procedures for working at up to 3GHz.
For their distributed switched Ethernet system Narad replaces all line amplifiers whereas Xtend reuses them and adds a parallel high frequency path with diplexing. An addition to the CPE splits out ‘regular’ cable and the data drops. As always these are easy statements to write, but early implementation almost certainly requires considerable systems integration for each customer.
So, what to use this bandwidth for?
Opportunities to provide video on demand channels, backhauled video, HDTV, voice over IP, full duplex high speed data and potentially even backhaul of such services as cellular wireless voice and data, come to mind. For most telcos there will be small and medium sized businesses, meeting areas, maybe hotels, not served by fiber, that would provide high ROI potential for early roll out. In my opinion, the challenge is not so much in the technology but in whether a particular ITC has the business model and the flexibility needed to pursue the prospect.
The companies have informative web sites, and each offers an interesting set of downloadable White Papers on both the technology and the business case, admittedly more MSO oriented but a useful primer none-the-less. Find Narad at www.naradnetworks.com and Xtend at www.xtendnetworks.com.
Clearly no ITC is going to upgrade their cable plant indiscriminately, but for special cases and for particular customers, the opportunities offered by this type of ‘bandwidth extension’ certainly bear consideration.
Please send any comments or questions to Peter at [email protected] or find him on the web at www.pixelconsult.com
Copyright 2002 Viodi, LLC. All Rights Reserved
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