Cable’s keeping it general: IP video, not necessarily IPTV

CEN Feature (Jun 8 2010) Cable / MSO

1. 

   You don’t really care, but …

    

   In college I was given three choices for a degree curriculum: history, English or journalism. I dismissed history because I thought I would end up wearing a tweed jacket and talking to bored underclassmen at 8 in the morning. I definitely decided against English the first and last time I had to parse a sentence. Finally, I opted for journalism as a way to improve the world through my words, knowing full well I would never get rich doing it.

    

   I’m batting about .500 on that last one.

    

   I thought about these decisions during The Cable Show in Los Angeles when a group of cable techs worked oh-so-carefully to parse the way the industry looks at IP. The terminology used most often was IP video not IPTV. And there’s a big, big difference.

    

   As a poor journalist (and you may offer whatever definition you like to either of those terms) I see IP video as a space somewhat removed from IPTV. IP video is YouTube and perhaps Hulu and any other Web site that builds its viewership around moving pictures. IPTV is a steady stream of always-there professionally produced video entertainment. Both require bandwidth. IPTV requires bandwidth and the ability to control how the content is reliably delivered to the end user.

    

   Perhaps that’s why cable guys avoided IPTV; they don’t really know yet how to use an IP network to deliver content reliably to end users. They’ve figured long ago how to do it around their metro rings, but when it gets to the home it’s still something of a mystery. A panel discussion among the industries CTOs about how cable plans to handle increased bandwidth demand for IP video, starting with upstream channel bonding to create a viable upstream pipe, bore out this suspicion.

    

   “If you maintain your plant you can provide a 30 meg (upstream) channel,” said Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice president of access networks for Rogers Cable Communications.

    

   That’s a lot of upstream bandwidth. It’s also a lot to ask most cable operators to “maintain” plants that could have seen as many as 30 summers and winters go by using a technology that was great 20 years ago—hybrid fiber/coax—but which has been surpassed by fiber-to-the-home when it comes to really delivering bandwidth.

    

   Other suggestions included 64 QAM using bonding and “fragmented MPEG-4,” as Comcast CTO Tony Werner put it. Werner said that cable’s challenge is less about IP as delivery method and more about “solving the pent-up demand from consumers with IP devices. We need to have an easy way to get our content to them.”

    

   At that point I was waiting to hear, “and of course we’ll be using a version of Carrier Ethernet to drive that content farther into our system with control and bandwidth.” What I heard were more suggestions about rearranging network infrastructure and building devices in the home and, in the case of Rogers, “keeping up with (mobile) capacity demand” by building fiber to the majority of cell sites.

    

   All well and good, but I felt like I was missing something. Perhaps it’s because I chose journalism rather than history, so I was unable to dig through the discussions to find the salient points I was seeking. Perhaps because I lacked an English degree I was unable to pull apart the sentences and find the active verbs and the terms Carrier Ethernet. Whatever the reason, when the cable techs talked about networks of the future, they somehow missed the network of today.

   Bookmark or Share this article

Login to comment.