NXTcomm08: CableLabs CEO calls for telco, cableco cooperation

The telecom and cable industries need to cooperate in supporting the U.S. State Department in its plan for the quadrennial reorganization of the ITU-T, the global telecom standards body, said Richard Green, president and CEO of CableLabs, Thursday to the NXTcomm08 keynote audience.

“We have a common cause in promoting American competitiveness,” Green said. By supporting the State Department plan to reorganize the ITU-T’s study groups and organizational structure, the U.S. can more effectively promote the innovation born here to a global audience, he added.

Green pointed to other venues in which cable and telco forces have cooperated at the technical level, including 3GPP and the Internet Engineering Task Force, and said he hoped such cooperation, which has helped further the IP multimedia subsystem cause among others, would continue.

The cable and telco industries also must cooperate to ward off Net neutrality legislation, Green said. “All service providers are at risk if the government writes itself into” the Internet access business, he added.

The CableLabs executive also encouraged those assembled to consider using the new tru2way technology, formerly known as the Open Cable Application Platform. tru2way is a layer of middleware developed to solve the problems of disparate cable network technologies by creating a single platform on which developers and software companies can create innovative applications.

“It’s a write-once, run-anywhere platform,” Green said, and it will be deployed in television sets and set-top boxes available at retail stores, enabling consumers to more easily connect to cable companies or change cable providers. LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony all have signed up to put tru2way into their TV sets, Green said, and these will start showing up by Christmas.

“This will let innovative content developers quickly gain access to a large national network,” Green said. “This has worldwide applicability, and it is an open platform not exclusive to cable, but available to any provider in any environment,” including mobile content.

Green gave the crowd fair warning, however, that with the adoption of DOCSIS 3.0, cable companies are prepared to deliver Internet access at minimum speeds of 160 Mb/s downstream and 120 Mb/s upstream, beginning as early as this year.