NEW ORLEANS - Nine months after the cable industry introduced its big catch phrase, “10G,” at CES in January, the man who coined that term himself, NCTA President and CEO Michael Powell, declared it to be a successful piece of marketing.

“It really is our new battle flag,” Powell said on stage of the opening session of this year’s Cable-Tec Expo event this morning. “It has restored in the minds of policy makers and the American public the importance of fixed networks, in addition to wireless networks.”

In short, Powell explained, the term has succeeded in its objective—whenever the wireless industry’s ubiquitous 5G calling card gets placed somewhere, there is an increasing awareness that the cable industry is also working on fixed networks that will deliver 10 gigabit-per-second symmetrical speeds.

However, during the opening session of the Society of Cable Telecommunications’ big annual trade event, itself titled "Raising the Bar," the question often came to mind, “When will we actually need 10 Gbps services?

After all, cable technologists entered this year’s expo having successfully festooned around 90% of the U.S. with DOCSIS 3.1-enabled 1 Gbps services. But none of the big cable companies are as of yet disclosing how many customers are actually using their pricy 1-gig services.

Certainly, the usual cadre of top-level cable technology engineers—which included Liberty Global’s Bill Warga, Comcast’s Tony Werner, CableLabs’ Phil McKinney and Charter’s Tom Adams—worked hard to sell the main convention hall ball room that there will soon come a day when applications like holographic display, virtual reality and autonomous cars will drive demand for much, much faster internet.

Adams, who serves as executive VP of field operations for Charter and will chair next year’s Cable-Tec Expo event, recalled that when he joined Charter seven years ago, the average internet speed threshold was around 15-30 Mbps. The growth of video streaming has increased that threshold to 200 Mbps - 1 Gbps, he noted.

Comcast’s top technologists, Werner, noted that 4K/HDR displays take up around 25 Mbps of bandwidth to play. “And in the next 24 to 36 months, i think will see another change in display technology, at least in one room of the house, that will consume a lot of bandwidth.”

Werner specifically highlighted the work of Light Field Lab, a start-up specializing in holograms that recently secured $28 million in funding from investors including Comcast.

Werner also noted that Comcast is well on its way to virtualizing its HFC networks, and has already converted some of its infrastructure to Remote PHY. However, at this point, the network infrastructure Comcast has upgraded to virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture is only capable of symmetrical 1-gig service

Later, noted inventor Dean Kamen took the stage to discuss with CableLabs chief McKinney all the aging-in-place and other bandwidth-intensive healthcare applications that will also soon require very high speeds and very low latency.

The two-and-a-half-hour session was wrapped by Preetha Vijayakumar, VP of enterprise network and communications services for FedEx. Citing all the bandwidth-intensive needs of the shipping industry, she noted, “It's my hope that we will get to the point where communications is cheap and ubiquitous, all across America.”

Vijayakumar left the stage declaring, “That’s the promise of 5G!”

ATLANTA -- Bill Warga, vice president, Technology for Liberty Global, and Tom Adams, executive vice president, Field Operations for Charter Communications, will co-chair the program committee for SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo 2019 in New Orleans.

The news broke during day one of the Cable-Tec Expo 2018 in Atlanta. Warga and Adams were re-elected as chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the SCTE•ISBE board of directors here.

Now the cable industry’s largest annual convention, the Expo -- which will mark its 50th edition next year -- is slated to be hosted in Denver and Atlanta multiple times between next year and 2019, with one-time stops in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

“In our role as the industry’s applied science arm, SCTE•ISBE is looked to for engineering expertise and workforce development that can move the needle in deployments,” Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers and the International Society of Broadband Experts, said in a statement. “Bill Warga’s background as immediate past chair of our Engineering Committee and Tom Adams’ keen understanding of the connection between workforce education and operational excellence ensure that Cable-Tec Expo 2019 will address those areas in ways that can have material impact on operators’ bottom lines.”

“The innovative spirit of our vendor community and the desire of operators to drive new customer experiences continue to fuel the success of cable telecommunications,” Warga said in the release. “Tom and I will be working together with the SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo 2019 Program Committee and our partners at NCTA and CableLabs to harness that energy and build an event that creates real value for our industry.”

“Ensuring that the workforce has the knowledge and the resources needed to convert new technologies into great customer experiences is key to cable’s future success,” Adams said. “I look forward to working with Bill and the 2019 Program Committee to continue the enhancement of SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo’s role in the industry’s educational and operational ecosystem.”

ATLANTA - Liberty Global VP of technology Bill Warga and Charter Communications Exec VP of field operations Tom Adams will return to their roles as chair and vice chair of the SCTE board for the coming 2018-19 campaign, the org announced today.

Related: SCTE Touts 10-Year Plan for Cable-Tec Expo

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and its sibling org, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE) also announced that Meena Soleiman, VP of finance, business operations and technology for Comcast, will serve as treasurer; and Steve Williams, director of DOCSIS for Charter, will be secretary.

“The guidance of our boards has been essential in making SCTE•ISBE one of cable’s most valuable and respected association resources,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE•ISBE, in a statement. “I look forward to working with Bill, Tom and the rest of the board in our 50th anniversary year as we continue to leverage our training, our standards and our partnerships with NCTA and CableLabs to deliver value to the bottom-line for our industry.”

DENVER — Though 1 Gigabit per second is the new billboard speed for broadband, the growth rate in downstream data speeds shows signs of slowing, though the precise reasons why have yet to be pinpointed.

That’s according to several top cable engineering executives who spoke at the SCTE•ISBE Rocky Mountain Chapter’s annual “Tech Exec It Out” panel. The panel followed the daylong Tech It Out conference held Nov. 16 by the Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) Rocky Mountain chapter.

Downstream data speeds had been getting about 50% faster per year, but that number has dropped to about 40% in some cases, panelists said in a session moderated by Leslie Ellis, president of Ellis Edits and Multichannel News technology columnist.

That trend suggests that downstream demand is shifting from exponential growth to linear growth, Tom Cloonan, chief technology officer of network solutions at Arris, said.

Building in Growth Potential
Matt Petersen, vice president of access architecture at Charter Communications, said the MSO is seeing a slight decrease in downstream demand. Nevertheless, Charter is pushing ahead with plans to roll out DOCSIS 3.1. Even if downstream data demands have begun to drop, though, the current pace of growth isn’t weak by any stretch.

“Forty percent is not slow,” Cloonan said, predicting that the industry’s hybrid fiber/coax networks will be equipped to deliver speeds of 10 Gbps in the 2020s.

Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture at Comcast, said data demands have ebbed and flowed before. “We’ve seen this time and time again,” he said.

Downstream trends aside, the industry is starting to key on new technologies and techniques that can help MSOs drive more capacity into the upstream. A big part of that centers on Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), an emerging CableLabs spec that envisions multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds.

The industry is making progress with FDX. CableLabs issued the physical layer specs for Full Duplex DOCSIS last month, a milestone that gives suppliers what they need to push ahead more rapidly with product development.

Related: Full Duplex DOCSIS Plows Ahead

“Gigabit in the upstream is an important addition,” Salinger said. Demand for upstream data isn’t being led so much by consumer activity as by machine-to-machine communications — such as cameras that record 24 hours a day, store content locally and then transmit that data upstream — and the all-encompassing Internet of Things.

“It’s something we can’t ignore,” Bill Warga, vice president of technology for Liberty Global, said.

Knittle said CableLabs is preparing to start interoperability tests of FDX-based nodes in Q1 of 2018, and the current plan is to be ready for full-on testing by the start of 2019. The timing is gauged on the availability of silicon, he said. “But it’s all starting right now.”

Pivoting to ‘Remote PHY’
Also underway is a pivot to more distributed, “remote PHY” architectures that place more electronics at the edge of the network and can bring more fidelity and capacity to the network while also relieving power and space requirements at the headend. “The node is getting smarter,” Warga said.

Distributed architectures will also enable cable operators to virtualize the network, and put more functions in software and lessen the reliance on purpose-built hardware.