Coming through!

The Internet of tomorrow might be closer than once thought. Companies are jumping on the high-fiber bandwagon to cater to the bandwidth-intensive applications that are the promise of the Internet. The industry has long discussed applications that will allow consumers to talk to and see their co-workers and family members and networks that will allow a full-motion movie to be streamed to a consumer's home TV.

Companies such as Advent Networks and GeoVideo Networks are working to bring these concepts to fruition.

Advent's President and CEO, Geoffrey Tudor, is betting that the battle for customers eventually will come down to digital service offerings as bandwidth-intensive applications grow in demand and competition heats up in the service provider space.

To that end, Advent developed the UltraBand platform, targeted at new cable network operators building hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) plant and multiple systems operators (MSOs) looking to decrease their node sizes and offer more digital services.

UltraBand operates over HFC plant, providing a minimum of 40 Mb/s per subscriber, Tudor said. The platform consists of two pieces of equipment, one at the operator's headend and the other at the customer premises.

"We wanted to build a platform to deliver packets over the last mile," Tudor said. "Like DSL, UltraBand provides a dedicated connectionto each subscriber."

At the headend, UltraBand turns the typically shared channels issued by the Cable Modem Termination System into a point-to-point channel, dedicated to a specific user, said David Fruhling, co-founder and chief operating officer for Advent.

The platform searches for 6 MHz chunks of analog, digital or data information - the standard amount into which RF frequencies are broken - and handles the channelization scheme and data transmission of those channels, Fruhling said.

"From a technology perspective, you've got a logically dedicated channel over a physically shared bus architecture," he said. "Some people say we're VDSL over cable - taking the concept of dedicated switched bandwidth, which you get with DSL, and simply using our technology to allow that connection to be created over an HFC or cable infrastructure."

The technology can be used as an alternative to cable modems or layered into an MSO's network. As long as an MSO continues to upgrade plant, adding fiber and decreasing the size of its nodes - which it will do in response to competitive pressure, Furhling said - it eventually can deploy UltraBand. The platform can operate over the same equipment used to broadcast analog and digital TV channels and DOCSIS cable modem channels.

"MSOs can dedicate channels to UltraBand and deliver those connections to new customers or those who decide to upgrade," Furhling said.

The more likely immediate audience for the platform, however, is overbuilders, or competitive video providers. They can include UltraBand in the new networks they are building and offer digital services to customers while putting competitive pressure on incumbent MSOs, Tudor said.

So far, Advent has no customers. A trial in Texas is set for the fourth quarter, and the company is talking to another potential customer in the Austin, Texas, area, Tudor said, but that company's network isn't built yet.

Despite that, Mitch Shapiro, research director with Broadband Markets, supported Tudor's theory, claiming that overbuilders will be interested in UltraBand - especially those still piecing together their business models to include business and residential users as the appetite for video-intensive services grows.

"All these guys who are talking about building a third network, an advanced fiber-based HFC with lots of fiber.... That's where Advent fits in," Shapiro said.

MSOs won't be tempted by Advent's platform until they feel the heat of competition, he added. "That's somewhat the nature of cable operators," he said.

They also may be lured by the recent deals Advent has inked with streaming media companies such as iBEAM Broadcasting and Cidera, which will place their content on Advent's network.

UltraBand gives operators another channel of high-speed content to deliver to customers, said Paul Palumbo, an analyst with DFC Intelligence.

"In a world going multiscreen, multimedia and multiplatform, you really have to offer a suite of services that can compete against satellite, DSL and the overbuilders," he said. "It's not just one answer to the solution of good programming, it's multiple answers to the solution of good programming that feeds multiple screens."

With the equipment on both ends of the network, UltraBand would cost less than $1000 per subscriber to install. Companies could potentially spend $5000 per subscriber with a fiber-to-the-home build, Advent's Tudor said. "Who's going to pay for a connection through the backdoor?" he questioned, adding that UltraBand is well-suited for any MSO looking for "a robust way to blast a lot of packets over the last mile."

Advent isn't alone in this arena. As people and businesses continue to gravitate toward higher-bandwidth applications - longing to share family pictures, corporate training material and even film clips across the Internet - other companies are looking at ways to optimize bandwidth for the video market.

GeoVideo Networks, a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, is building a business-to-business video network that Chief Operating Officer Bryce Combs predicts will become a standard for high-quality duplex interactive TV or video. Initially targeting the B2B market, GeoVideo Networks claims its network can support speeds of OC-3 to OC-192 and beyond and also will support T-1, T-3 and DSL configurations.

For a monthly fee, the network will store customer content, ranging from full-length feature films to corporate training material. It also can provide video at 30 frames per second supporting 16 individual video windows that can be manipulated simultaneously on the desktop, Combs said. The application is made possible via GeoVideo's Browser, which complements a digital connection equal to or better than broadcast, he added.

The features will support e-training, e-learning and other video applications for use by businesses in the financial, medical, government, news and entertainment industries.

"In some ways, we're turning the clock all the way around, back to before wiring and telephones and letting people go eyeball to eyeball for business communications - and [doing so] in an environment where you can have multiple video sources at the same time," Combs said. GeoVideo recently launched its first live operation, dubbed the Showcase Network, which spans 4980 miles to link New York TV station 13/WNET to Los Angeles' KCET-TV.

Over the New York-to-L.A. connection, GeoVideo Networks currently is streaming real-time high-definition TV (HDTV) at 19 Mb/s. In addition, the stations can use GeoVideo's browser to run collaborative software over the top of the network, enabling them to discuss everything from programming to production capabilities, said Arthur Salvadore, vice president of GeoVideo Networks. Businesses can combine video teleconferencing with video-on-demand (VOD) on the same desktop, he said.

And as more bandwidth-intensive applications are developed, the need for the network will grow. "We're not even smart enough today to know all the applications that are going to ride on this," Salvadore said.

Eventually, the company will expand its efforts to the consumer market, with plans to deliver VOD and electronic cinema.

"To move video the way we're talking about here, you have to do it with a virtual private network," Combs said.

Businesses that send information via same-day couriers will see the cost-saving potential offered by GeoVideo Networks, but that is the company's secondary market, said Richard Doherty, director of research with the Envisioneering Group.

Instead, GeoVideo Networks should dedicate its network to TV stations and film companies interested in delivering HDTV-quality video and to the Hollywood post-production, special effects and editing companies that need to stream, Doherty said.

In the long term, engineers will be able to control coverage of broadcast events via high-speed fiber without traveling to the location, he predicted. "Instead of hundreds of technicians on video cameras... you can have them stay at home, go home to their families at night and control everything remotely as if they were in the room."

The savings in labor and traveling expenses alone will offset the cost of service, he added.