Looking for options

Charter to review Nortel/Antec gear in second VoIP trial Charter Communications has covered its end-to-end IP bets by selecting a second set of vendors and launching a voice-over-IP trial with 500 subscribers in St. Louis.

Last summer, Charter chose Cisco Systems, Telcordia Technologies and Motorola to supply gear for an IP trial in central Wisconsin. Now the 6.3 million-subscriber multiple systems operator (MSO) is using Nortel Networks, Arris Interactive and Antec to try the same thing in St. Louis.

In each case, the goal is DOCSIS interoperability with eventual migration to PacketCable when that CableLabs guideline is standardized, said John Pietri, senior vice president of engineering for Charter.

"Our first test this past summer showed the quality was definitely up to standards. We did not encounter any problems with the voice quality or the signal quality of this riding over the DOCSIS platform," Pietri said.

The Wisconsin trial is being stepped up a level and will run parallel with the nascent St. Louis effort. In both instances, Pietri hopes to gather enough information to initiate a full-scale, IP voice and data rollout by the end of 2001 or early 2002.

"I think you'll find that either solution that we're testing will be PacketCable-compliant when the standards are in place," he said. Until then, Charter will continue to follow DOCSIS 1.1 guidelines.

The trial also marks the second IP effort for the Nortel/Antec pairing, said Dan Middleton, vice president of local Internet for Nortel."One of the other large MSOs is doing this as well," he said, declining to name that operator. "Between them, they cover about half the U.S. market."

Nortel and Antec - soon to become Arris - partnered with their joint venture Arris Interactive to present a unified front, Middleton said.

The St. Louis trial will emphasize operational issues, Middleton said. "It gets the operational billing services side of things out of the way for Charter, and they understand how it works," he said. "It's not really so much a technology test. They have to go through the kinks of testing it out and proving it, but I don't think that's really the issue. It's more operational that they have to get going."

With its telephony background, Nortel understands the complexities a typical video-based cable system faces when it enters the voice arena - even using IP, Middleton said.

"There are some skills they need to pick up,... and it will take them a period of time to understand how to run the business effectively. We'll help them with that," he said.

Nortel also supplies equipment for Adelphia Communications' telephony effort in Buffalo, N.Y., but that's not a pure end-to-end IP system, Middleton said.

"That's a hybrid system, where we're using both a regular switch with IP access and headend gear and we have a gateway in between," he said.

The 500 St. Louis subscribers will be friendly to Charter, Pietri said, but they include "more than just employees. We won't charge for the service during the trial, although we will be testing the back-office systems we'll put in place to see how they function in that environment," he said.

The two IP trials should provide answers on a number of levels, including equipment interoperability, Pietri said. "We've spent a lot of time and money deploying specific DOCSIS architectures. As we go through the trial, this will evolve to the point where we can use other vendors' equipment in these networks without having to worry about interoperability issues."