SCTE-ISBE has hooked up with Comcast and Liberty Global on a contest that will look both inside and outside the industry for new ideas and “breakthroughs” on how to manage energy across broadband networks.

The contest, called the Adaptive Power Challenge, aims to spur development on new technologies and solutions that can help manage energy across broadband networks.

The contest will award winners in two categories – Established Enterprises (includes companies with 250 or more employees), and Breakthrough Organizations subs as labs, universities and startups. Each winner will get $10,000. Per the fine print, applicants must be 18 years or older. Applicants retain all rights to the documents submitted and all content.

There’s no fee to enter. An application deadline has been set for Friday, June 29. Organizers said the industry is particularly interested in solutions that address access networks and edge facilities, which represent between 73% to 83% of a cable operator’s energy consumption.

Entries will be evaluated in Q3 2018 by a panel of judges that includes Debbie Fitzgerald, principal architect at CableLabs; Mark Glaser, senior engineering, critical facilities engineering and operation at Cox Communications; Mark Hess, SVP of business and industry affairs at Comcast Cable; Sam Khola, director of sustainability at Liberty Global; Todd Musat, director, critical infrastructure service, Shaw Communications; and John Dolan, senior guideline specialist at Rogers Communications.

Finalists in each category will be announced September 12 at the SCTE-ISBE Standards Energy Management Systems Plenary in Louisville, Colo.

Six finalists will compete by presenting their solutions on Tuesday, Oct. 23 at the Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta, with two winners to be announced on-site.

The presentation portion of the contest among the six finalists will use a Shark Tank-type format, noted Chris Bastian, SVP and CTO at SCTE-ISBE.

Winners will also be invited to MSO labs to work on ideas that, hopefully, develop into scalable solutions, he added.

The Adaptive Power Challenge ties into the SCTE-ISBE Energy 2020 program. The current goals are to reduce power consumption by 20% on a unit basis, reduce energy costs by 25% on a unit basis, and to reduce grid dependency by 5%.

Bastian said the current goals of the program, which hit its mid-point in 2017, are on track.

That work also has connections to the Adaptive Power Systems Interface Specification (APSIS), also known as SCTE 216, which aims to give MSOs a way to adjust power consumption on converged cable access platform (CCAP) devices during peak and non-peak periods.

RELATED: Comcast Tests ‘Turning the Knob’ on CCAPs

“The Adaptive Power System Interface Specification and other APSIS-related standards were created to give cable communications providers a universal framework for reduction of unnecessary energy usage,” Frank Sandoval, chair of the SCTE-ISBE Standards Program’s APSIS Working Group, said in a statement. “The Adaptive Power Challenge’s incentives are intended to encourage anyone with a creative energy idea to help us expedite innovative applications that can deliver real results for the broadband industry and the communities it serves.”

DENVER — Comcast’s downtown Denver lab is spinning up a proof of concept (PoC) involving the Energy 2020 “APSIS” initiative, which aims to give operators a way to “turn the knob” on energy used by critical network components — in this case, CCAP (converged cable access platform) devices.

RELATED: SCTE/ISBE Goes Open-Source for Adaptive Power Play

“APSIS” stands for Adaptive Power System Interface Specification. It matters because it ultimately addresses the biggest part, by far, of any operator’s electricity bill: The physical infrastructure, from the side of the home to headends and data centers, which represents up to 75% of what’s spent on power.

RELATED: Arris, WES, Concurrent Thinking to Demo Adaptive Power Tech

The APSIS news came out of the Energy 2020 program, which launched at the 2014 Cable-Tec Expo, and met earlier this week. Tracy Baumgartner, executive director of sustainability for Comcast (and yes, she’s married to Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner), noted during her update that “just a few blocks away from here, we are in the midst of a PoC on an APSIS program, specifically with a CCAP device … because we’re looking to prove that we can adjust energy usage with software.”

If everything works out as intended, the APSIS PoC will prove that service flows on a CCAP device can be measured, and, as a consequence, those flows can be programmatically activated and deactivated in the lab.

RELATED: Operators Seek Sustainability, Savings

“It also includes a web app … which makes APSIS more visual and approachable, because it shows how energy can be controlled, and it shows the reduction in energy usage,” Baumgartner said. “It demonstrates how this is really all about just turning the knob,” to turn down electricity consumption on certain components — like CCAP, to start — when the network isn’t actively being used.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely at or on your way to the 2016 Internet & Television Expo, a.k.a. INTX. As is usually the case, the tech-talk scene is oozing with impressively nerdy gibberish. May this handy decoder ring help you navigate it with aplomb.

Let’s start with APSIS — pronounced “app-sis” — which stands for “Adaptive Power System Interface Specification.” It hails from the world of energy sustainability, specifically the SCTE’s Energy 2020 program. The gist of it is this: A lot of the big stuff in broadband/cable networks use electricity all the time, and not as a function of usage.

But what if you could “turn down” or turn off certain components when they’re used less, say, in the middle of the night? That’s the aim of APSIS. It’s a big deal because it’s that outside plant — the “access plant” — that represents about 80% of a typical service provider’s annual spend on electricity.

Capacity is perennially a trending topic at gatherings such as INTX, and this year offers no shortage of tech-talk around it. Watch for a lot of discussion about threading fiber deeper and deeper into neighborhoods, thus making serving areas smaller and smaller — so that at some point, when Bandwidth Hungry Harry wants a direct-fiber connection, it’s not a budget-buster to get it to him.

Related gibberish that’s good to know: When people start talking about “N+0,” or “N+1,” they’re talking about the number of amplifiers after the node (where fiber optics hand off to coaxial cable). The lower the better, and it doesn’t get much lower than zero.

Taking fiber deeper also means an assured increase in the number of nodes — by 3 times, in some estimates, and depending how deep the fiber reaches. That’s why energy efficiency is a constant refrain in design discussions about next-generation gear. It’s also why the term “remote PHY” keeps popping up, too, where PHY stands for “physical layer.”

“Remoting” the “PHY” sits (as one of several terms) in the vast bucket of tech-talk that is Network Functions Virtualization and Software-Defined Networks. The idea: Take some of the stuff out of those nodes and put it “higher up” in the network. Two INTX tech sessions will attempt to tackle that chewy topic.

Speaking of the tech-paper scene at this week’s Spring Technical Forum — it’s the mother lode of solid engineering information, every year, and this year doesn’t disappoint. My favorite for the oh-so-nerdy title: “4096 OFDM implementation on the HFC Plant with Fiber Deep and Distributed Access Architecture,” by Cisco’s Maxwell Huang.

My personal/professional favorite 2016 tech paper — and as someone with a long and deep history of concern about the super-skinny “upstream path” (Internet-facing, from the home) — especially as webcams proliferate: “Full Duplex DOCSIS,” by John Chapman and Hang Jin, with bonus points for the uber-succinct title.

Here’s why this matters: “Full duplex” is when a transmission medium can transmit in both directions, simultaneously. (By contrast, a walkie-talkie is “half duplex,” as in, “hello, over.”) You can’t do full duplex if there are amplifiers anywhere along the communications path, because they contain the (diplex) filters that define the downstream and upstream signal directions (which brings us back to “N+0”).

Yes, there are ways to widen the upstream from its current boundary (42 MHz) to other, higher/wider boundaries — but with full duplex, there’s no need to keep revisiting amplifiers to change out the filters, to go to the next step wider, and the next one after that. It’s immediate, dynamic, and adjustable. That’s pretty big stuff. The question to ask, should this come up in your cocktail conversations, is this: “Sure, Joe, but how non-trivial is it to get there?” (Engineers tend to cleave to that word “non-trivial.”)

Relatively new this year but big for automation and, initially, making customer care and product development better is the landscape of machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive/neural adaptations; there’s a whole session on it on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., led by Comcast executive vice president and chief technical officer Tony Werner.

For the show floor — mind you, this is being written the week before INTX — here are a few pointers on some “under the hood” things that matter: Almost all talk about “smarter WiFi,” and “better/smarter connectivity,” will be anchored by the next version of the Reference Design Kit (RDK). That’s what gave rise to Comcast’s X1 line, Liberty Global’s “Horizon” navigation and all the stuff that’s generally received as “gorgeous navigation.”

Next up is “RDK-B,” where the “B” stands for “broadband,” and aims to do the same level of “making stuff better” for cable modems, gateways, WiFi spigots, and all the stuff that feeds our online lives.

That’s a quick look at the tech talk of this year’s INTX. You are now in a good position to play “stump the chump” with impressively nerdy fare! Good luck and see you there.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com..

(Photo Credit: Captain Midnight Decder Ring, by Sobebunny - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7274827)