Chinook gets money to stretch cable bandwidth

(Telephony) Massachusetts-based start-up Chinook Communications has received $17 million in funding to pursue the idea that there is never enough cable bandwidth.

An investor group of OneLiberty Ventures, SaldenVC, BancBoston Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and YankeeTek Ventures gave Chinook enough money to make it through the middle of next year.

"The plan is to get us through some trials and have products available," said Andy Audet, Chinook's president/CEO. "We'll need money after that to hit profitability."

Chinook's technological timing is pretty good. In times of economic hardship, it hopes to extract more from existing cable systems via relatively inexpensive software and hardware upgrades, thus saving the potential cost of upgrading or rebuilding systems to meet future demand.

"The real play here is pretty simple. It's more bandwidth," said Audet.

Stocked with a group of MIT-trained technicians, Chinook can embed about 6 megabits of data on every analog channel on a cable system. Since most cable systems now have about 80 analog channels, that's close to 500 megabits of data that wasn't previously available, Audet said.

The bandwidth is within each channel, not on top, and is tunable, so it can be combined to create bigger blocks.

"It's very simple," he said. "We encode it at the headend … then at the end device [there is a] chip in a cable modem or set-top box where it will be decoded. It will be just like having more bandwidth, like having another 200 MHz of plant available."

Audet said Chinook must work with cable headend and consumer premises equipment [CPE] vendors to integrate its technology, noting that those players are interested because "it provides them with a nice value-add in their boxes."

For cable operators, it's just cheap bandwidth.

"Money's a little tight for everybody, so really this leverages the infrastructure they have installed and extends it a little more," Audet said.

Money was not too tight for Chinook.

"For us, it isn't bad timing," Audet said. "The biggest goal for us is to get somebody to grab it, believe in it, get some installations. It's a small industry out there, so once the ball starts rolling, you're in good shape."