TESTING THE LIMITS OF THE CUSTOMER PREMISES

The battle for the soul of the broadband customer goes on behind closed doors. But it's not all behind the doors to the development labs where ingenious engineers hatch super-secret capabilities. Nor is it all behind the doors to the central office from which all bandwidth flows. One of the biggest battles is being waged by technicians behind the doors to the den and to the family room.

“The home is the new frontier,” said Dave Holly, head of the cable networking division for JDSU. “It has dramatically changed what is being introduced to the network [by end users] as well as the portfolio of [test] tools we must develop and deploy.”

In this new frontier, the key to winning the broadband battle — not that there ever will be a clear-cut winner, only interchangeable market leaders — may depend on the weapons, or tools, with which service providers outfit their technicians.

With FTTH and FTTN implementations in full swing, significant changes are taking place in all aspects of network testing that will affect not just an upswing in the sale of test gear, but how, from where and by whom live networks and services are tested.

There are still those vendors looking for ways to “outfit the Super Tech,” said Peter Schweiger, business development manager for optical network test systems at Agilent. But he and others believe that may never happen. In some respects, the technologies are too numerous and complex for technicians to have command of them all. For the same reasons, it is untenable to have a single tool a tech can carry.

Test equipment manufacturers are trying to strike a balance between building what Schweiger calls the “minimum viable product” — a hand-held device with a couple of red and green lights that tests continuity and perhaps a little jitter and response time — and a full-blown analyzer that looks at Sonet, Ethernet and dense wave division multiplexing and acts as an optical time domain reflectometer and perhaps even POTS tester in the same box. He calls it, poetically, the difference between “tools for techs” and “instruments for engineers.”

On the technician side, equipment manufacturers must respond to several dynamics within service provider organizations. At the same time carriers are rolling out FTTx capabilities and adding services such as Gigabit Ethernet and IPTV, they are proceeding on their long-term goals of rolling back standards for technical competence in their work forces by putting more smarts into their tools than their techs.

This strategy is enabled partly by fiber optics itself, which has the characteristic of either being bad or good: a green light versus a red light. Adding to this is the capability via wireless technology to have more complex problems addressed by remote engineers who can pour over reams of protocol analysis either in real time or later.

The strategy also is necessary because, as Robert Heintz, vice president of sales and marketing at Sunrise Telecom, said: “Service providers want their techs to get in and out as quickly as possible because time is money.”

He also said that large service providers are hiring whole new groups of technicians for fiber installation. “They are hiring people who have not installed this type of technology before and are training them from scratch,” Heintz said.

However, FTTx technology and the services that run over them are new for even longtime technicians on both the telecom and cable sides of the business. So the need for smaller, externally simple, yet internally complex hand-held test tools to install and maintain fiber-based high-bandwidth services is driving a growth spurt in the test market.

According to a report this month from Dittberner Associates, worldwide FTTH shipments were up 22% quarter-over-quarter and 180% from the same quarter last year. Although 81.5% of the 925,000 new FTTH subscribers added worldwide were in Japan, there have been several FTTH and FTTN deployments in the U.S., especially by the ILECs.

Dittberner also reported that Verizon has not slowed its deployment of broadband passive optical network (PON)-based products even while it contemplates other options such as Gigabit Ethernet PON — which is predominant in Japan. Verizon has seen a dramatic decrease in the cost of FTTx deployment and now puts the cost of connecting a home with fiber at $715 compared with the $1200 it cost last year. This could help AT&T and BellSouth decide to deploy more FTTH while cutting back on DSL upgrade plans.

The momentum is carrying through to the test market, Heintz said. “We are seeing a pretty dramatic increase as a result of fiber to the home and to the node. And we've also seen dramatic shifts in what telephone companies need to test.”

Traditionally, Heintz said, telephone companies like to drop something off at the side of the house. And for that they still have their traditional test sets. “It's pretty straightforward. You shoot some light down the fiber, take a couple of measurements or in some cases just turn up the equipment, and if it works, you're done,” he said. “But the real interesting conversation is what happens inside the house.”

Cable techs have been entering customers' homes since day one. Telecom techs have avoided it at all costs. Whatever advantage cable companies have there won't last long as both types of companies, regardless of their physical medium, are becoming local area networking companies when it comes to the customer premises.

The dual infrastructures of cable and telecom are also driving growth for test companies, said Jim Nerschook, vice president of marketing for the telecom field service group at JDSU.

“With the actual access network extending into the home, telecom people are facing something completely different from what they've been used to,” Nerschook said. “It brings a whole new set of requirements and test tool needs.”

Test companies also have to adapt to what's inside the home. “We have to be able to deal with everything: CAT 3 cabling, CAT 5 cabling, coax cabling, wireless 802.11 and technologies like HPNA and MOCHA,” JDSU's Holly said.

Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HPNA) technology and Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MOCA) are part of the physical layer testing that test companies have mastered. The real “test” for vendors and service providers will be mastering the testing of services.

While telecom companies struggle to learn the fine points of testing video and the cable companies struggle to master the essence of voice as a real service, the two can join in their struggle to become the masters of the home networking domain enabled by FTTH.

Agilent's Schweiger said the market for test gear is growing in two directions: physical layer testing and services layer testing. Since most companies building hand-held test gear have physical layer testing well in-hand (pun intended), the biggest upswing, he said, is in Ethernet-based tools. And technicians of either make — cable or telco — “don't know Ethernet,” he said.

That's partly why Agilent has built the FrameScope Pro test tool, which Schweiger calls the “Ethernet butt set.” The FrameScope tool is still a little pricey to hand out to every installer or maintenance tech, but it's typical of the direction test gear is going.

Besides replacing complex measurements with red and green lights, Agilent has made its displays graphical.

“It's all about representing the data in a way that first-time technicians and customers can understand,” Schweiger said. “You can still have it do extremely powerful things behind the scenes, but with big friendly buttons that say ‘auto test.’” He said a technician can run a test, show a customer and the customer gets it. “If you show a customer something in a T-1 test set, they'll run away screaming and probably call your boss for insulting them,” Schweiger said.

There also is another characteristic of Ethernet that makes it easier for both test equipment manufacturers and technicians to design and use tools for the future: “Nothing changes when you go to a higher bit rate, so everything is scalable,” he said.

He said the ultimate test box would be a simple hand-held device with a copper GigE port and an optical port where software options are simply added on for the different application such as voice over IP and IPTV.

JDSU's Nerschook said that once inside the home, technicians could no longer rely on the concept that if the test tool says the fiber is good, then the service must be good. End users have been tolerant so far because they are just happy to have such big pipes delivering data into their homes and businesses — they wouldn't even notice if they were being throttled back on their bandwidth by 10% to 20%. As users get more sophisticated, they are looking for proof that they are receiving the bandwidth they have been promised. And with services like IPTV, it becomes more obvious when they are not.

JDSU has been providing cable providers with video test tools that cover the headend to the set-top box for years. After acquiring test company Acterna in August 2005, JDSU announced last month it will acquire Test-Um, a provider of home networking test instruments for the FTTx and digital cable markets.

The acquisition gives JDSU a whole portfolio of instruments for testing inside the home, including wire mapping tools that map out wire taps inside the house, service validation tools, continuity testers and performance measurement tools.

“Everything short of a protocol analyzer,” JDSU's Holly said.

Given the drive for simpler tools for technicians, analyzers are the piece of the services-layer puzzle that will be reserved for engineers.

“The trick is, you need technicians to tell you if there is a complex protocol issue or a physical issue within the network,” Holly said. “Because if you are getting into diagnosing a complex protocol issue, the cost of the tool is going to go up. And while it would be ideal for a test vendor to deploy high-end analyzers, it's just not practical out in the field for either usability or from a cost-per-technician perspective.”

That leads to downloading protocol analysis to second-tier support teams who use the information not so much to troubleshoot problems but to create benchmarks by which future service upgrades can be determined.

While companies press on to make on-site tools for FTTx deployment visibly simpler, they are still trying to pack in as much functionality as possible. Just this week, Sunrise Telecom introduced its Home Test Toolkit (HTT) test set, which it designed specifically to facilitate the deployment of next-generation triple-play services.

The SunSet HTT is specifically tailored to mass-market FTTN deployment. It integrates a range of nine functional tests for in-home testing and allows technicians to test every interface and signal at the customer location during installation. It also takes advantage of some back-office systems that allow for the recording and storage of on-site test results. In keeping with the industry's more simplistic approach, it provides automatic “go-no-go” test routines for VDSL, HPNA, radio frequency video, Ethernet, 802.11x wireless, copper loop fault identification, POTS testing and in-house wiring identification and testing.

Holly said that because of the fundamental differences in the outside plant architectures of cable providers and telecom companies, there always will be the need for specialized tools and single-purpose instruments.

“However, in a few years they will all be doing home networking where voice and video and the DVRs and wireless signals will be all-IP,” he said. “It might be fiber or twisted pair, but at the end of the day they will all look similar inside the house.”