KEEPING AN EYE ON THE NETWORK

Only an estimated 20% of hybrid fiber/coax networks have currently been upgraded to two-way transmission, but the two-way frenzy is nevertheless in full swing. Caught up in the rush to offer interactive services-telephony and data, most recently-over their HFC plant, cable operators have tended to turn a blind eye to the possibility that offering such services may involve more than making the network bidirectional.

However, if last year was the year of the upgrade-when cable operators first began announcing two-way plans and working upgrades into their budgets-then this is the year when those operators are recognizing that offering interactive services requires a more careful look at the reliability and quality of their network in the form of network management.

"Cable operators have been upgrading their plant to support interactive services," says Andy Paff, president and chief executive officer of Integration Technologies. "But improving their networks to offer these services means more than just making them two-way. They need to get into issues like network management and reliability."

Problems that have long plagued the cable industry, including network outages and unresponsive customer service, just won't fly when critical services such as telephony and data are added to the equation.

"Until now, the customer has been the network management system," Paff says. "If there is an outage, the cable company finds out because it starts getting calls, and it uses that to figure out where the problem may be. It's crazy by any standard."

For most cable operators, the cost of upgrading a system to two-way transmission, combined with the cost of network management, could be the straw that breaks their backs. For example, when Southwestern Bell Video Services developed a request for proposals to offer telephony over its HFC system in Montgomery County, Md., the company estimated that the cost of upgrades to support a 25% penetration rate for telephony would be $325 per home, says Randy Tomlin, vice president of engineering operators for SBVS.

And while network monitoring solutions, backup powering options and redundancy in the headend have long been part of telcos' networks, cable operators have never felt much of a need for such elements.

"With a broadcast architecture like most cable companies have today, there's not a lot of performance monitoring or network monitoring going on," says Tim Wilk, director of strategic planning and technology for the transmission systems division at Scientific-Atlanta. "Most [multiple systems operators] opted not to deploy those capabilities in the network because they weren't necessary for entertainment services. But when you add a lifeline service like telephony, those things become critical."

In an entertainment-based industry, in which an outage typically has meant only an inconvenience to the customer, adding such critical services creates network imperatives that are unfamiliar to most cable operators.

"The construction part of upgrading our network for interactive services was fairly simple," says Tomlin. "It's the management issues that we had to worry about."

One such issue was the human factor that underlies any network management solution. Part of SBVS's budget for its upgrade included re-educating or replacing a significant portion of Montgomery Cable's work force, as well as raising both wages and performance levels for network technicians, Tomlin says. "For a cable company to compete with a telephone company, it has to be focused on customer service," he says. "We felt that our technicians needed to be more focused on customer service, and only about a quarter of the work force could do that." SBVS also planned to replace a number of Montgomery Cable's headend managers with switch managers, Tomlin adds.

When SBVS was sure that its work force would be responsive to customers' needs, its next step would be to make sure that those network managers were aware of any problems before the customer had to deal with them, a phenomenon that Tomlin admits is relatively rare in the cable industry.

"The cable industry doesn't have to deal with [Federal Communications Commission] regulations that require them to record each call about a network problem, like the telephone industry has to do," he says. "This means they haven't had to put in any extensive network monitoring."

But some sort of service management solution is necessary to deliver telephony service, says Jim Balma, solutions executive of network operations in the telecommunications and media industry unit of IBM. So the cable operator can address any network problems on a proactive, rather than a reactive, basis.

As part of that service management system, cable operators must learn how to adapt as their situation changes from a point-to-multipoint broadcast network to a point-to-point network for telephony, data and true interactive video, Balma says.

"In the broadcast mode, you're in a situation where you're just connecting and disconnecting service," he says. "Now cable operators are facing a situation where they need to track customer and terminal information, and they need to enhance their network management systems and skills to do that." Distributing intelligence throughout the network instead of limiting it to just the headend will enable cable operators to more effectively manage point-to-point services, Balma adds.

"The low intelligence of the older cable networks is what forced customers to be the ones to identify problems," he says. "But as network operators start to incorporate intelligence into the nodes with servers and software and at the home with intelligent set-tops and cable modems, they'll be able to deal with each customer on an individual basis."

Some MSOs have taken a first step toward network management by incorporating some element management components that control a single piece of the network. In particular, network operators have tended to keep a careful eye on the headend, because a headend element failure could lead to a systemwide outage. Montgomery County Cable, for example, would monitor receivers and monitors at the headend, SBVS's Tomlin says, but it didn't pay much attention to the trunks or drops of its network, even though a trunk failure could affect multiple customers.

Unfortunately, however, most cable operators see element management as the same thing as network management, says Gordon Greenfield, vice president of marketing at Superior Electronics Group. "Everyone calls everything network management," Greenfield says. "But there's more to network management than knowing if one element or another is working."

The first part of effective network management is adopting a monitoring solution for all of the network's elements, not just a select few that have the greatest impact on the network, Greenfield says.

"Cable operators need to not only continuously check the health of active devices in their networks, like receivers and amplifiers, but also constantly evaluate the quality of the signal, which they tend not to do now," he says. "For example, a system's amplifiers could be working but might have a high carrier-to-noise ratio, which means there's a bad signal and the customer gets snow. Without signal monitoring, the carrier won't know that's happening until the customer calls."

Cable operators ultimately need to adopt an overarching network management solution located at the headend that ties all of these element management systems together, says Scientific-Atlanta's Wilk. Ideally, he says, element managers at various hubs and headends will send updates, as well as alarms in the event of a failure, to a central headend, where the network management system will filter the information, providing the operator with a single screen that displays the status of the network as a whole.

"Using a system like that, an operator can go to a red signal that indicates an alarm, click on the signal, take it down to the system within the region that the alarm is for, and then work down to the very amplifier that has failed," Wilk says. A cable operator could use this to manage multiple systems from a central location, which creates enormous cost efficiencies and makes problems much easier to resolve, he adds.

No one denies that incorporating such network management capabilities will be expensive. However, it may prove to be a much less difficult proposition than cable operators fear. Simply making the network two-way means network management will be easier, says Balma.

"With two-way capabilities, cable operators don't have to wait for the customer to call if something's wrong," he says. "The old cable networks are tree-and-branch structures with very little telemetry coming upstream. But as you gain two-way capabilities, you gain a path for upstream telemetry, which allows the network to basically tell you what's wrong."

Enhanced services aside, adding network management functionality also means that MSOs can offer better video services, an appealing proposition as cable operators face competition from telcos, wireless cable and satellite delivery operators.

"As cable customers begin to realize that they have options, they'll begin exercising them," says Superior's Greenfield. "Competition will raise the level of quality that a cable company needs to provide, and effective network management can help."

Moreover, setting up an effective network management system now will make it easier for cable operators to take the next step in offering telephony and data services: tying network management into centralized operations support and billing systems.

"Once they have network management to monitor the plant, cable operators will need to take it a step further and add another degree of management capability," says Wayne Pardington, group product manager of network access systems at Tellabs. "Things like keeping information on the customer base, monitoring call usage patterns and doing itemized billing can give them an edge in the competition."

Adopting operations support capabilities is something that telcos have been working on for years, Pardington says. But cable operators have a significant advantage over telcos-they don't have the cumbersome legacy systems that telcos are trying to re-engineer.

"Because they don't have any OSSs other than rudimentary billing, the cable industry can start fresh," Pardington says. "Without any legacy systems or embedded OSSs, they're a lot more agile than their telco counterparts and can move much faster."