All cable, no glitz, Engineering show focuses on data, Sonet

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers may have had its toes trampled on by Supercomm's scheduling this year, but its Cable-Tec Expo '97 in Orlando managed to stand tall anyway, with a record number of attendees and exhibitors, including several newcomers to the show.

Unlike the more flashy National Cable and Western Cable shows, the Expo traditionally has been a nuts-and-bolts event, which many vendors find refreshing and good for business. "It's just easier to concentrate and talk to the people you really want to talk to without all the noise and music and craziness going on, like at the National show," said one exhibitor.

Expo attendees concentrated on high-speed data, with exhibitors touting every conceivable flavor of cable modem products.

The push for high speed Betting that the cable industry will continue its slow pace of system upgrades, several vendors demonstrated their one-way cable modems with telephony return paths.

"Cable modem manufacturers are seeing a demand for telco-return modems because operators don't intend to upgrade their cable plants fast enough to offer two-way services on a widespread basis," said John Aronsohn, senior analyst at The Yankee Group.

Scientific-Atlanta's dataXcellerator modem system delivers throughput of up to 1.2 Mb/s per user downstream, with a built-in 28.8 kb/s telephone modem providing the upstream path. The dataXcellerator cable modem is less expensive than many models on the market - $199 for volume shipments - and Scientific-Atlanta currently has commitments for 40,000 units.

General Instrument also showcased its one-way cable modem system, the SURFboard network, which delivers speeds of up to 27 Mb/s downstream over a 6 MHz channel. MediaOne is using the SURFboard system to support its MediaOne Express cable modem service in Jacksonville, Fla. - the first deployment of a one-way service by a large multiple systems operator (MSO).

Terayon Corp. has taken a different route in addressing the cable industry's slow upgrade pace, opting instead to develop a cable modem that can operate on existing coax plant. Terayon, a newcomer to the Cable-Tec show, released results from its trial with Sumitomo Corp. in Japan over an all-coax system serving more than 62,000 homes.

Sumitomo conducted the trial in a 6 MHz band spanning from 12 to 18 MHz - one of the noisiest regions in the upstream spectrum - using Terayon's patented synchronous code division multiple access technology. The results prove that MSOs don't necessarily need to undertake the enormous cost of upgrading their systems to take advantage of demand for high-speed data, a Terayon spokesman said.

"Cable operators want to get into the data market, but they just don't have the capital to upgrade their systems and don't want to rely on the telephone network for the return path," he said. "Giving them a way to deploy two-way data services over their existing networks will provide them with a big competitive advantage.

The vendor community's push for high-speed data services isn't falling on deaf ears. Mid-sized MSOs first began announcing cable modem rollouts en masse at the National Cable show in March, and the trend continued at the Cable-Tec show.

Intermedia Partners announced that it has begun delivering the @Home cable modem service to test homes in Nashville using gear from Motorola, and it will begin commercial deployment in September.

Meanwhile, cable modem newcomer U.S. Robotics announced that trials of its telco-return system will be conducted by Charter Communications in St. Louis and by Insight Communications in suburban Indianapolis.

Building a better backbone Cable-Tec exhibitors say that mid-sized MSOs are playing follow-the-leader in other areas as well. While top-tier cable operators, particularly Cox Communications, have been building Sonet backbones for some time, smaller operators are also starting to employ Sonet as an important cornerstone for the advanced services they may roll out in the future.

"Once you've got that Sonet ring in place, it's much easier to offer services like telephony later on," said The Yankee Group's Aronsohn. "Operators are finding that while hybrid fiber/coax is good for video, it's not as good for those advanced services, and putting in Sonet rings as part of the backbone really increases reliability.

Historically, however, delivering video over Sonet has been difficult because the video signals have had to be digitally compressed, which results in signal degradation. In response, cable operators have been building Sonet architectures for their voice and data services while keeping their video services on a separate linear system, which is inefficient and expensive.

Several vendors at the Cable-Tec show sought to resolve that problem by demonstrating Sonet systems that do not require the video to be digitally compressed, enabling cable operators to deliver voice, data and video over a single Sonet network.

"We're trying to make Sonet cost-affordable and efficient for video," said Paul Connolly, vice president of the opto-electronics business unit at Scientific-Atlanta. To that end, Scientific-Atlanta debuted its Prisma digital transport product, a Sonet multiplexer that converts video signals from analog to digital without compression.

Along the same lines, GI demonstrated the N-Able Sonet offering, which its NextLevel Broadband Networks Group is developing with Fujitsu Network Communications. The N-Able system consists of an OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s) add/drop transport system that has been optimized for asymmetrical communications for broadcast video transport, as well as duplex DS-3 (45 Mb/s) modules for voice and data.

Tellabs used the Cable-Tec show to highlight the expansion of its Sonet family with its new Titan 5200 broadband node. Designed to work in conjunction with Tellabs' Titan 5500 wideband digital cross-connect system, the Titan 5200 node acts as a gateway for DS-1 (1.54 Mb/s) traffic between the Tellabs Cablespan cable telephony system and the Sonet fiber ring network.

As small and mid-sized cable operators begin stringing their networks with Sonet, they're also interested in consolidating their headends, said George Walter, group product manager at Barco. The more rural MSOs tend to have the largest geographic areas to cover, making it more efficient for them to deploy one or two "super headends" and cascade the signal over unmanned hub sites, Walter said.

Barco's Lynx digital supertrunk system features an interface unit that permits unlimited cascading of optical links, allowing an operator to connect as many hubs as the system requires. The device also supports advanced drop/add and pass capabilities at each hub site. Each Lynx transmitter provides two 194 Mbyte outputs, allowing the operator to multiplex 32 channels per fiber.

New toys Also well-represented on the show floor were the tools that cable operators will need to support their new services, particularly network and element management systems.

GI showcased its NETsentry system, a modular, centralized HFC network software solution that provides an end-to-end overview of the network. The simple network management-based solution enables the network operator to do fault, security, configuration and performance management of all equipment in the HFC network, including the headend, fiber nodes, RF distribution and power supplies.

Cable operators also are interested in using new technology to mine information about their customers, allowing them to more effectively market new services to their subscribers.

To that end, Pioneer New Media debuted its M7 controller, a Windows NT-based platform designed to work with Pioneer's Entertainer advanced analog set-top box. The M7 controller uses a relational database to monitor customers' ordering habits and preferences, said Jim Slade, president of business and product development for Pioneer.

"The ability to track what subscribers are interested in is something that cable operators need to be doing, but it's definitely underutilized," Slade said.