CATV show ponders network management

Reliability was the catch phrase at last week's Cable-Tec Expo in Nashville, with vendors touting network management solutions far more sophisticated than cable TV operators have used in the past.

"Incorporating network management into cable systems is a major challenge for the industry," said Andy Paff, president and chief executive officer of Integration Technologies, a joint venture between Antec and Northern Telecom. "What cable TV companies have for network management right now is nothing more than rudimentary billing systems."

As recently as last year, most multiple systems operators believed adding telephony and data services to their networks would entail little more than upgrading their networks and adding return path electronics, Paff said. They are now realizing the importance of monitoring those networks to ensure high reliability. To that end, network management vendors are introducing hierarchy-based network management solutions that allow networks to be monitored on an element-by-element basis while also providing a broad picture of the entire network.

"If you only monitor your amplifiers, then all you're aware of is when those go down-and then it's guaranteed that your subscribers have lost service," said George Walter, product group manager at Barco.

Barco's solution is Copernicus, an open architecture element management system located at the headend that provides automatic alignment, source backup, destination backup, filtering of alarm messages, system reporting and security provisioning. Copernicus is designed to oversee not just the performance of network elements but also the performance of the signal itself, which can alert cable operators to problems, Walter said.

Copernicus can also interlink data about various parts of the network, including network performance, headend performance and billing operations, he added.

Although Copernicus was developed to host Barco's Rosa network management software, it is an open system and is compatible with any third-party software, Walter said.

Industry experts agree that broadband network management solutions will need to be open to accommodate a wide range of vendor equipment.

Superior Electronics' CheetahNet network management system is designed to manage a multivendor hybrid fiber/coax network. Superior has signed interoperability agreements with a number of network hardware manufacturers, including a deal with Ortel that was announced last week.

"Most vendors offer management solutions that monitor only their own products," said Gordon Greenfield, vice president of marketing at Superior. "We provide third-party monitoring that integrates disparate element monitoring systems to evaluate the entire system."

Approaching the open architecture issue from the element management side, Integration Technologies announced last week that it would work with Smallworld Systems to provide broadband operators with network design and database management capabilities that can be accessed by other operations support and network management systems.

Integration will develop custom applications using Smallworld's geographic information system platform, allowing operators to collect information about the physical layout of their networks. Database information will be stored in an open format, allowing it to be accessed by higher-level OSS applications that require data about the network and its configuration.