Research and development group CableLabs announced the elimination of 23 jobs, more than 10% of its staff, the organization confirmed. 

A rep for Louisville, Colorado-based CableLabs pointed to overlap created by the integration of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), the tech training organization that became a subsidiary of CableLabs in early 2021. The rep said the layoffs were a result of overlap between “shared services such as IT and HR,” and their elimination was an attempt to increase efficiency while “reducing management overhead.”

The majority of the cuts were felt by employees of Kyrio, the for-profit subsidiary that handles DOCSIS certification.

CableLabs also told Next TV that it's simultaneously creating seven unspecified new positions on its technology team.

News of the layoffs was first reported by Light Reading. 

“This was committed to the board of directors in 2020 as part of the planning for the SCTE acquisition,” said a CableLabs representative in an email to Next TV. “The role and responsibility of SCTE has not changed.

“There is no impact on the level of resourcing for our technology teams,” the rep added. “And in fact, it is increasing based on the savings being allocated to projects and near-future innovations.”

The last major CableLabs layoffs, which took place over eight years ago, saw 27 employees lose their jobs. 

As the saying goes, Comcast enjoyed the meal so much it hired the chef. 

The cable giant has hired CableLabs chief technology officer Belal Hamzeh, who led the development of the DOCSIS 4.0 cable network tech standard that Comcast is actively deploying right now, to serve as VP of access technology and system engineering. 

Hamzeh communicated the change on his LinkedIn profile, and Light Reading was first to report on the transition and confirm it with Comcast. 

CableLabs, meanwhile, provided this statement to Next TV: “Dr. Belal Hamzeh joined CableLabs 10 years ago and he has contributed greatly to the development of new technology innovations critical to the cable broadband industry. Belal has an excellent opportunity to bring his expertise to one of our member companies and we are very pleased that he will continue to collaborate with CableLabs in his new role.” 

CableLabs said that Mark Bridges assumed the role of CTO, effective June 1.

Bridges is a 13-year veteran of the cable industry technology consortium who last served as VP of the future infrastructure group under Hamzeh. 

Cable-technology consortium CableLabs and its subsidiary Kyrio will start their certification process for cable modems using the new DOCSIS 4.0 network standard on June 26. 

DOCSIS 4.0 is the successor technology to DOCSIS 3.1, which was hoisted upon the cable industry a decade ago by CableLabs. It’s a broad grouping of technologies needed to deliver the cable industry's promise of a “10G” future — download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second, and upload speeds as high as 6 Gbps. 

And testing ain't cheap. According to FierceTelecom, modem certification starts at around $200,000 to test a single device in one iteration of DOCSIS 4.0 — either the Full Duplex (FDX) variety preferred by Comcast, or the Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) version adopted by Charter and Cox. It cost more if you want to test using both technologies. 

To manage costs for operators, CableLabs and Kyrio are introducing “success-based testing” — devices can be updated during the certification process without additional fees until they are successfully certified.

CableLabs and Kyrio are also not charging extra to test DOCSIS 4.0 modems for verified DOCSIS 3.1 interoperability. 

The consortium is hosting a Zoom session on Wednesday, June 28 at 11 a.m. MT to provide more details about its certification program. More information can be found on this page.

The cable and telco broadband and technology industries, working together, have cut set-top box energy use by 57% since a voluntary energy-efficiency effort was launched almost a decade ago. In 2021 alone, that saved consumers $2.5 billion on their energy bills.

Those findings come from an annual report from independent auditor D+R International, a report was required as part of the voluntary agreement. 

It hasn't hurt that the number of deployed set-top boxes has decreased significantly, down nearly one-third since 2012. The overall decrease in boxes is combined with more energy-efficient set-tops and an increase in purchases of non-DVR internet protocol (IP) boxes that consume far less energy, the report pointed out.

Then there is the cord-cutting that has reduced the number of U.S. TV homes with a set-top from 58% of those homes as recently as 2016 to only 37% in 2021.

In 2012, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, the Consumer Technology Association and CableLabs signed the Agreement for Ongoing Improvement to the Energy Efficiency of Set-Top Boxes, with other signatories that accounted for 95% of the traditional pay TV market in 2021, according to NCTA.

Among the companies that struck voluntary agreements are Comcast, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and DirecTV and Dish Network.

There will be more reports to come.

Last year, the signatories extended the agreement through 2025, with more rigorous energy-savings targets and the goal of cutting set-top energy use by two-thirds, with 86% of that reduction goal already reached by the end of 2021, the report concluded. ▪️

Registration has opened for the 2021 Cable-Tec Expo, put on by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. In 2020, the gathering was virtual, but this hybrid convention will be held at the Georgia World Congress Center, which SCTE said was the first convention center in the country to achieve GBAC STAR accreditation for cleaning, disinfection and infectious disease prevention.

Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at Cox Communications, is the program chair. He will be joined during the general session by technology executives whose organizations play a key role in moving the cable industry forward: Wendell Weeks, Corning’s chairman and CEO; and Eric S. Yuan, the CEO and founder of Zoom Video Communications.

Separately, the Cable TV Pioneers will hold an induction banquet ahead of the convention.

For more information, visit https://expo.scte.org/.

The cable industry’s two major technical bodies have officially agreed to merge.

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), will now become subsidiaries of CableLabs, effective Jan. 1. 

According to the groups’ joint announcement, both boards voted unanimously for the move, and the SCTE membership gave its “overwhelming support. 

Also read: SCTE and CableLabs Set to Merge

“The pace of innovation requires that the work—which begins with research and development of published specifications, industry standards and products deployed to market—is efficiently integrated and broadly made available. This assures that innovation, specifications, standards, training and deployment are more efficiently connected,” said Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs. “This move represents the industry’s ongoing commitment to 10G, rapidly delivering new innovations and services that meet ever-evolving consumer needs and support of the future expansion of broadband deployment.”

CableLabs, established in 1988, is a research and development consortium backed by the big, consolidated operator giants of the U.S. and Canadian cable industries. Its members had earlier voted unanimously to pursue the tie-up.

“The increased alignment that will come out of this relationship is critical,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE•ISBE. “Streamlining vendor and international relationships creates efficiencies in connecting implementation, best practices, needs and allocation of resources across the industry. We’re proud to join the CableLabs family.”

Faced with a period of rapid tech innovation that is disrupting much of the traditional TV business, research into new technologies at the CableLabs, led by CEO Phil McKinney, will be worth watching over the next few years.

The impact of this research is apparent in the research consortium’s work on 10-gigabit networks, mobile convergence, artificial intelligence and new 3D holographic entertainment experiences. 

When McKinney took the top job at CableLabs in 2012, he brought with him a long career in software and tech startups, providng the expertise that he’s used to help operators speed up the pace of innovation.

“Around 82% of the U.S. now has access to 1 gigabit [of internet speeds, up from] less than 3% three years ago,” McKinney said, with more to come. “Today’s networks are not going to be the networks of 10 or 20 years from now. We are going from 1 gig to 2 gigs, to 10 and 25 gigs. It is never-ending. There is nothing to indicate that you get to some speed and you’re done.”

To help with that, CableLabs launched a 10G initiative that has already produced some successful trials with blazing 10-gigabit network speeds. “10G will not only enable the continuing growth of our networks but also improve economic growth,” McKinney said. 

Other top priorities include: research into mobile and mobile network convergence that will create new services and allow content and data to seamlessly flow between mobile and traditional cable networks; work on artificial intelligence to create more reliable, networks; cybersecurity; and new ways of creating and experiencing content like the upcoming holographic Light Field technologies, McKinney said.

Rapid change will also require more investment in training for tech teams. That imperative led to the recently announced merger with Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers /International Society of Broadband Experts (SCTE•ISBE), which will become a subsidiary of CableLabs. “There are hundreds of thousands of employees who have to be trained to deploy these new technologies,” McKinney said. “Bringing the two organizations together will create reduced overhead costs so we can invest more in training programs.” 

Signaling another level of consolidation for the cable industry, its two biggest engineering trade groups are on the path to merging.

SCTE-ISBE and CableLabs have signed a letter of intent and appear well on the way to combining forces by Dec. 10. 

CableLabs, established in 1988, is a research and development consortium backed by the big, consolidated operator giants of the U.S. and Canadian cable industries. Its members have already voted unanimously to pursue the tie-up.

The 51-year-old Society of Cable Technology Engineers, and its European sibling, the International Society of Broadband Experts, are currently conducting a vote among the combined trade group’s membership to approve the merger. The threshold is a two-thirds vote, with at least 5% of the membership body voting. 

The SCTE-ISBE, which said no cutbacks in staff or programming was expected at either organization, has outlined its vision for the merger on this landing page. 

At the heart of the messaging is “10G,” the catch-all buzzword the cable industry has attached to its effort to develop next-generation broadband technologies capable of warding off the wireless industry’s fixed 5G threat. 

“With the commitment to 10G in mind, the transaction will represent the industry’s ongoing efforts to deliver to consumers new innovations and services which will meet changing consumer needs and support the future expansion of broadband deployment,” the trade group tells its members. 

As outlined in a press conference conducted Tuesday by CableLabs, Mark Dzuban would remain president and CEO of SCTE-ISBE, which would function as a subsidiary of CableLabs, headed by president and CEO Phil McKinney. 

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE) and the SCTE Foundation today announced a new scholarship that will memorialize longtime cable industry technologist Doug Semon.

The ‘Zelmo’ – Doug Semon Scholarship will award grants each year for an initial period of four years to FIRST robotics teams and their college-bounds seniors. Named in honor of a lifelong nickname Semon used for himself and his work, the award is intended to advance careers in technology, and will be supported by SCTE Foundation assistance in securing internships for winners. Semon was an avid supporter of the FIRST Robotics program in and around Denver, and mentored George Washington High School’s FRC Team 1410, “The Kraken.”   

The award has been created by the SCTE Foundation and past honorees of the Women in Technology Award that is presented annually by SCTE•ISBE, Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) and CableFax. Donations can be made at on the ‘Zelmo’ – Doug Semon Scholarship page of the SCTE Foundation website.

“Doug was a formidable champion of cable technology and a tremendous ally of all of us who shared his passion for science,” said Yvette Kanouff, vice chair of the SCTE Foundation, partner and CTO of JC2 Ventures and a WIT Award winner. “On behalf of the SCTE Foundation and all of the Women in Technology winners from the last 25 years, we mourn the loss of a friend and colleague, an industry pioneer, and the husband of our dear friend, Leslie Ellis.”

After beginning his career as a cameraman with Buckeye Cable, Semon moved to Channel 100, where he rose to general manager. As director of new technology with Viacom from 1981-96, he was instrumental in setting up one of the first cable modem trials in partnership with Intel and Hybrid. The trial launched in 1994 and touted 10Mbps downstream and 128Kbps upstream during a time when the industry standard was 28.8 kpbs. Semon joined CableLabs as director of network operations in 1996 and oversaw technology developments and standards for subscriber services for Time Warner Cable beginning in 1998. He holds various patents, was named a Cable TV Pioneer in 2003 and became a DOCSIS Pioneer in 2019. He died on Aug. 18 of complications after a recent heart attack and is survived by Ellis, a technology author and analyst and a longtime contributor to MCN.

“Doug was always quick to see potential – both in our networks and in people – and to provide the guidance that would help them become their best,” said Zenita Henderson, vice president of marketing and business development for SCTE•ISBE and a WIT Award winner. “We are honored to remember the work he has done for our industry, and to help the next generation of technology pioneers in his name. We hope everyone will join us in contributing to Doug’s legacy and to helping young technologists join in his footsteps.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed another technology conference, CableLabs’ inaugural 4Front event.

“Due to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus and efforts to maintain social distancing, 4Front is canceled as the health and safety of our attendees is our top priority. At this time we are working through the details for 4Front 2021 and will begin posting more information in the coming weeks,” CableLabs said in a statement through its PR firm.

Related: CableLabs to Launch New Tech Event, 4Front, in Denver Next June

CableLabs announced last summer that it was going to replace its annual “Summer Conference” with a broader, multi-disciplinary event drawing top minds across the global technology scene.

Speaking to Multichannel News in August, Phil McKinney, CEO of the cable industry technology consortium, said the multi-day event will draw thought leaders and innovators from a broad swath of global industry, focused on a core topic of what technological dreams can be enabled on future ultra-high-speed, super-low-latency broadband networks.

“The goal is to bring these innovators together to drive different conversation around innovation, and answer the question, what does that three to eight years out look like,” McKinney said. “We want other people to get in the room with us.”

CableLabs was targeting more than 150 executive speakers from more than 100 companies situated in 20 countries around the world. Nineteen hours of sessions were to have been delivered from June 23-24 at the Gaylord Rockies Event and Convention Center.

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed another technology conference, CableLabs’ inaugural 4Front event. 

“Due to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus and efforts to maintain social distancing, 4Front is canceled as the health and safety of our attendees is our top priority. At this time we are working through the details for 4Front 2021 and will begin posting more information in the coming weeks,” CableLabs said in a statement through its PR firm. 

Also read: CableLabs to Launch New Tech Event, 4Front, in Denver Next June

CableLabs announced last summer that it was going to replace its annual “Summer Conference” with a broader, multi-disciplinary event drawing top minds across the global technology scene. 

Speaking to Multichannel News in August, Phil McKinney, CEO of the cable industry technology consortium, said the multi-day event will draw thought leaders and innovators from a broad swath of global industry, focused on a core topic of what technological dreams can be enabled on future ultra-high-speed, super-low-latency broadband networks.

“The goal is to bring these innovators together to drive different conversation around innovation, and answer the question, what does that three to eight years out look like,” McKinney said. “We want other people to get in the room with us.”

CableLabs was targeting more than 150 executive speakers from more than 100 companies situated in 20 countries around the world. Nineteen hours of sessions were to have been delivered from June 23-24 at the Gaylord Rockies Event and Convention Center.

CableLabs has published the anticipated specifications for DOCSIS 4.0, the next technology standard for moving data across the cable industry’s hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks.

The new specifications, an upgrade over the industry’s current DOCSIS 3.1 standard, will enable cable systems to deliver download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. Upstream speeds can approach speeds of 6 Gbps.

Importantly, DOCSIS 4.0 unifies two competing technologies for moving HFC networks to 10-gig speeds. Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX) would combine downstream and upstream signals on a single frequency, delivering symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps. FDX is favored by Comcast, but its stringent network technology requirements made it economically infeasible for many operators.

Extended Spectrum DOCSIS keeps upstream and downstream traffic separate. But it would increase the spectrum of HFC networks to 1.8 GHz from a current level of 1.2 GHz found on the fastest networks.

Working Towards 10G

CableLabs is the technology consortium for the major U.S. cable companies. And it’s serving a broader cable industry initiative called “10G,” an effort to migrate cable networks to a future in which 10 Gbps speeds power increased cloud applications, video conferencing, smart homes and distance learning — a future that is, well, here today for many of us.

DOCSIS 4.0 gives cable industry engineers in purchasing roles clarity on how to move forward in a network technology realm being disrupted by virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture (DAA).

“With the DOCSIS 4.0 specification establishing a clear path forward, giving cable operators the flexibility to pursue either Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) or Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), operators can move ahead with their remote PHY and remote MAC-PHY deployments to solve immediate headend and power consumption issues,” Dell’Oro Group analyst Jeff Heynen wrote in a March blog post.

But don’t look for commercial deployments of DOCSIS 4.0 networks by operators in the months to come. Cable operators still have a glut of network capacity from huge investments made over the last five years in DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure. These buildups enabled them to offer customers 1 Gbps speeds, the ceiling for which consumers are nowhere near bumping into just yet.

Cable's Net Holds Fast

And the networks are holding up well to current capacity strains wrought by homebound social distancing. Comcast’s top technologist, president of technology and product Tony Werner, said the No. 1 cable company’s networks are holding up just fine in locations like San Francisco and Seattle, which have seen traffic increases as high as 60% in peak weekend usage hours recently.

“Usage is on the rise as more people are working, learning and doing all their entertaining at home,” Werner said on a March 30 call with reporters. “But it’s all within the capability of the network.”

CableLabs has published the anticipated specifications for DOCSIS 4.0, the next technology standard for moving data across the cable industry’s hybrid fiber/coaxial (HFC) networks. 

The new specification, which is an upgrade over the cable industry’s current DOCSIS 3.1 standard, will enable operators to deliver download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. Upstream speeds can approach speeds of 6 Gbps. 

Importantly, DOCSIS 4.0 provides a unification of two competing technologies for moving HFC networks to 10-gig speeds. Explained here in detail in a 2017 CableLabs blog post, Full Duplex DOCSIS would combine downstream and upstream signals on a single frequency, delivering symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps. Full Duplex is favored by the leading U.S. cable operator, Comcast, but its stringent network technology requirements made it economically infeasible for many operators.

Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (blogged about by CableLabs in September here) keeps upstream and downstream traffic separate. But it would increase the spectrum of HFC networks to 1.8Ghz from a current level of 1.2Ghz found on the fastest networks. 

CableLabs is the technology consortium for the major U.S. cable companies. And it’s serving a broader cable industry initiative called “10G,” an effort to migrate cable networks to a future in which 10 Gbps speeds power increased cloud applications, video conferencing, smart homes and distance learning—a future that is, well, here to today for many of us. 

But don’t look for commercial deployments of DOCSIS 4.0 networks by operators in the months to come. Cable operators still have a glut of network capacity from huge investments made over the last five years in DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure. These buildups enabled them to offer customers the 1 Gbps speeds, the ceiling for which consumers are no where near bumping into just yet. 

But DOCSIS 4.0 does give cable industry engineers in purchasing roles clarity on how to move forward in a network technology realm being disrupted by virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture (DAA). 

“With the DOCSIS 4.0 specification establishing a clear path forward, giving cable operators the flexibility to pursue either Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) or Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), operators can move ahead with their remote PHY and remote MACPHY deployments to solve immediate head-end and power consumption issues,” wrote Dell’Oro Group analyst Jeff Heynen, in a blog post published two weeks ago. 

CableLabs has published the anticipated specifications for DOCSIS 4.0, the next technology standard for moving data across the cable industry’s hybrid fiber/coaxial (HFC) networks.

The new specification, which is an upgrade over the cable industry’s current DOCSIS 3.1 standard, will enable operators to deliver download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. Upstream speeds can approach speeds of 6 Gbps.

Importantly, DOCSIS 4.0 provides a unification of two competing technologies for moving HFC networks to 10-gig speeds. Explained here in detail in a 2017 CableLabs blog post, Full Duplex DOCSIS would combine downstream and upstream signals on a single frequency, delivering symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps. Full Duplex is favored by the leading U.S. cable operator, Comcast, but its stringent network technology requirements made it economically infeasible for many operators.

Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (blogged about by CableLabs in September here) keeps upstream and downstream traffic separate. But it would increase the spectrum of HFC networks to 1.8Ghz from a current level of 1.2Ghz found on the fastest networks.

CableLabs is the technology consortium for the major U.S. cable companies. And it’s serving a broader cable industry initiative called “10G,” an effort to migrate cable networks to a future in which 10 Gbps speeds power increased cloud applications, video conferencing, smart homes and distance learning—a future that is, well, here to today for many of us.

But don’t look for commercial deployments of DOCSIS 4.0 networks by operators in the months to come. Cable operators still have a glut of network capacity from huge investments made over the last five years in DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure. These buildups enabled them to offer customers the 1 Gbps speeds, the ceiling for which consumers are no where near bumping into just yet.

But DOCSIS 4.0 does give cable industry engineers in purchasing roles clarity on how to move forward in a network technology realm being disrupted by virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture (DAA).

“With the DOCSIS 4.0 specification establishing a clear path forward, giving cable operators the flexibility to pursue either Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) or Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), operators can move ahead with their remote PHY and remote MACPHY deployments to solve immediate head-end and power consumption issues,” wrote Dell’Oro Group analyst Jeff Heynen, in a blog post published two weeks ago. 

Broadcasters and cable operators are battling over use of the 6 GHz band the FCC is looking to free up for unlicensed wireless in its relentless search for more spectrum for advanced communications.  

Broadcasters are trying to protect their incumbent electronic newsgathering (ENG) in the band while cable operators are trying to expand their WiFi domain.  Something may have to give.

Computer companies are on cable's side when it comes to freeing up the entire band for sharing with unlicensed broadband, while wireless carriers are with broadcasters in arguing the threat of interference to licensed mobile users. 

Related: Big Tech Takes Issue with NAB 6 GHz Study

In meetings with FCC engineering staffers in the Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), representatives of CableLabs, Charter and Comcast said they were convinced that there was a way to allow for use of the entire band for unlicensed use, including WiFi, which they said would "not only alleviate growing congestion on existing WiFi spectrum resources, but will also unleash unparalleled innovation with the deployment of WiFi 6, which is essential to the continued expansion of broadband performance for Americans." 

But while the cable ops told the FCC they were sure that incumbents could be protected from harmful interference and urged the FCC to move quickly to open the band, broadcasters had a very different story. 

In their own meeting with OET staffers, NAB executives said while they were willing to work with the FCC and other stakeholders to allow for unlicensed to share with some fixed uses in the band, the same was not the case for sharing with mobile ENG uses.  

NAB told the FCC that all of the current proposals are "simply incompatible with mobile broadcast operations used for electronic newsgathering – and no proposal advanced by any party to date will protect those mobile operations." 

NAB said the FCC needed to "recognize this fundamental incompatibility," and concede that unlicensed operations in those ENG portions of the band "cannot presently be authorized without creating entirely foreseeable risks for harmful interference." 

Top CableLabs officials, including CEO Phil McKinney, sat alongside NCTA chief Michael Powell a year ago at CES in Las Vegas, as the former FCC chairman introduced the world to the concept of “10G.”

At the time, the initiative seemed like a mere marketing buzzword, a counter-play to the wireless industry’s massive 5G push, intended to re-direct attention to all the new network technologies being developed by cable operators, along with their research and development consortium, CableLabs.

A year later, with CableLabs announcing a number of key technology benchmarks, the consortium’s newly appointed chief research and development officer, Mariam Sorond, told MCN that—at least to CableLabs—“10G” is about much more than a mere counter-marketing slogan.

Related: CableLabs Names Former Dish Wireless Exec Chief R&D Officer

“I think the marketing will come when we’re actually able to show [10 gigabit-per-second] speed,” Sorond said. “The cable industry tends to wait for tangible results,” she added, before touting them.

Posting an update on the CableLabs website, Sorond outlined CableLabs’ futuristic vision for 10G, which involves not only new DOCSIS network technologies on the access end, but also fiber-to-the-home, mobile backhaul and front-haul, fixed wireless and enterprise MDU/SMB schemes, all connecting to a hub via super-fast coherent optical connection. (See diagram below.)

The days of building massive, sprawling nationwide networks are in the past, Sorond believes, with cable operators’ robust infrastructures playing a crucial role in next-generation networks built on MVNO-based building blocks.

“We don’t necessarily need nationwide macro wireless networks anymore,” she said.

Meanwhile, highlighting CableLabs’ recent progress, Sorond—formerly Dish Network's chief wireless architect—noted numerous benchmarks. Among them:

• The specification for DOCSIS 4.0 will be completed in early 2020. CableLabs began developing D: 4.0 last year, marrying Full Duplex DOCSIS and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS. (Full Duplex is favored by Comcast, delivering super-fast, symmetrical network speeds and ultra-low latency. But its very restrictive node requirements—N+0—had other cable operators looking at the softer restrictions of Extended Spectrum.)

• Sorond said modems using the current DOCSIS 3.1 standard, built with integrated 2.5-gig ports, and capable of 5 Gbps, are about to hit the market.

• CableLabs released a new 200 Gbps point-to-point coherent optics specification, which is intended to support the aggregation of distributed access architecture.

• As an update to DOCSIS 3.1, CableLabs and its partners completed specification for Low Latency DOCSIS, a technique allowing traffic that requires low latency to travel across the hybrid fiber coaxial network in just 1-2 milliseconds. 

As cable operators shift to broadband-first strategies, emphasizing high-speed internet access, industrywide tech organizations CableLabs and SCTE-ISBE are looking into the future to build next generation infrastructures.

A key part of that is upgrades to broadband networks, including 10G networks that will offer speeds of 10 gigabits per second. “10G is a major initiative for us and you will see the first trials in 2020,” Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers-International Society of Broadband Experts president and CEO Mark Dzuban said.

Some of this is being driven by the move to higher-quality video formats, including High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats that offer much improved color and higher resolution formats like 4K and 8K. “We have a number of members that are working to prepare to start broadcasting in 8K around the 2020 Olympics,” explained Phil McKinney, the president and CEO of CableLabs.

RELATED:The New Normal: Streaming Takes Center Stage

The move towards streaming, internet-protocol video and a host of other services — ranging from gaming to video conferencing, education and telemedicine — are also driving demand for faster networks. “Low latency is a critical part of improving the gaming experience,” Dzuban said. “If you have multiple 4K terminals [TVs and other devices] streaming 4K or 8K video, that can exhaust bandwidth very quickly.”

Cord-cutting is another major factor. In a recent study of operators, OpenVault found that broadband usage hit 275 gigabits a month in the third quarter of 2019, up from 228 GB a year earlier.

Even larger increases were found in homes that cut the cord. OpenVault found that broadband customers who cut the cord in March of 2019 increased their usage from 387 GB a month to 488 GB by June of 2019. “Cord-cutting and consumers going on broadband only is going to have a major impact on their networks,” Mark Trudeau, CEO and founder of OpenVault, said.

Further down the pike are also new technologies like light field displays, noted Dzuban and McKinney. These light field displays show full, volumetric 3D images with no need for glasses.

McKinney noted that some smaller displays, about one foot wide, are already in operation and that CableLabs has been working on the technologies with members such as Charter for three and a half years. He said the first consumer applications should become available in the next three to eight years.

But those applications will require huge amounts of bandwidth and data, which makes the 10G initiatives even more important. “A five-minute clip will take up hundreds and hundreds of terabytes,” McKinney said. “To deliver that into a reasonably sized TV you need a gigabit network or maybe something a little faster.”

CableLabs has announced plans to replace its members only “Summer Conference” with an open, broad-reaching technology event called “4Front” in June of next year.

According to Phil McKinney, CEO of the cable industry technology consortium, the multi-day event will draw thought leaders and innovators from a broad swath of global industry, focused on a core topic of what technological dreams can be enabled on future ultra-high-speed, super-low-latency broadband networks.

“The goal is to bring these innovators together to drive different conversation around innovation, and answer the question, what does that three to eight years out look like,” McKinney said. “We want other people to get in the room with us.”

CableLabs is targeting more than 150 executive speakers from more than 100 companies situated in 20 countries around the world. Nineteen hours of sessions will be delivered from June 23-24 at the Gaylord Rockies Event and Convention Center.

In conjunction with today’s announcement, CableLabs is debuting the fourth in its short film in its “The Near Future” series, which showcase applications that will be emerging, or somewhat ubiquitous, three to eight years from now, and how our work, home and social lives will be transformed by them.

McKinney has worked with a the same small cadre of filmmakers since his days serving as CTO at Hewlett-Packard under Carly Fiorina. Three years ago, this group began shooting short experiential vignettes, examining how technologies, currently consigned to labs and trials today, will change everyday life in the, well, near-term future.

The latest vignette, titled “Diverse Thinkers Wanted,” is the most challenging to date, attempting to showcase not just how technologies like light-field display and AI will change the way we collaborate at work, but this world will self-initiate Our protagonist in the video, a young women sent to an unfamiliar city to deliver a presentation, finds herself being unwittingly tested by a prospective client she’s supposed to be delivering a presentation to. It's this woman’s ability to thoughtfully and creatively interact with al the various next-generation technologies at her disposal that passes the test and wins her company the contract.

“You’re seeing a little more subtlety this time,” McKinney conceded. “In this new world, you’re not longer witnessing participants stop to think and structure the ask. The technology itself knows when it’s needed to take on the task.”

CableLabs has named former Dish Network wireless executive Miriam Sorond to the role of senior VP and chief research and development officer.

In her new role at the cable technology consortium, Sorond will direct the execution and adoption of new technologies for CableLabs members and the broader cable industry, working closely with org CEO Phil McKinney on vision and strategy.

She had been at Dish Network, most recently serving as chief wireless architect and VP of tech development. Her two-decade career also includes a stints at Nextel, ICO and PrimeCo, and vendors such as Lucent Technologies (now Nokia).

"As we advance toward a digital future encompassing even greater wireless capabilities, it is crucial for both CableLabs and the broadband industry at large to be led by innovative executives with extensive knowledge in wireless technologies and technology policy,” said McKinney.

Added Sorond: “CableLabs invents the future through technologies that connect our society with better communication and quality, offering a unique environment for the insatiably curious. I look forward to working with this transformational and passionate team to deliver solutions that break barriers and are implemented around the globe.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance today announced a new, standardized tool for collecting diagnostic data on home WiFi networks.

According to CableLabs, the just announced WiFi Certified Data Elements will aid service providers in their quest to troubleshoot and optimize home WiFi networks, a task that “will be critical to deploying 10G,” the cable industry tech consortium said.

CableLabs announced last July that it was partnering with the Wi-Fi Alliance on the initiative.

According to CableLabs, WiFi Certified Data Elements will address “many WiFi [proactive network maintenance]-related pain points identified by members of the cable community.”

These include a lack of visibility into customers‘ WiFi networks and the high cost of WiFi troubleshooting.

While proprietary WiFi proactive network maintenance solutions exist, they require deployment of costly proprietary technology in customers’ equipment and are too restrictive in terms of analytic capabilities, CableLabs added.

“Wi-Fi networks have gained complexity due to the number and types of connected devices,” Wi-Fi Alliance vice president of marketing Kevin Robinson said. “WiFi Data Elements provides greater insight into WiFi network behavior so that service providers more quickly diagnose issues and deliver better customer service, even as WiFi user device types and numbers increase.”

CableLabs has released new specifications for DOCSIS 3.1 that enable the HFC network technology standard to support the very low latency required for virtual reality and online gaming.

Low Latency DOCSIS (LLD) is a software upgrade to existing DOCSIS 3.1 equipment, blogged Steve Glennon, distinguished technologists for CableLabs’ Advanced Technology Group.

He said the cable technology consortium is currently working with tech vendors to get LLD into the market. LLD, Glennon added, is part of CableLabs’ broader “10G” toolkit—a collection of technologies, which also includes things like Full Duplex DOCSIS, aimed at a forward-looking cable industry paradigm in which hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks deliver symmetrical broadband speeds of 10 Gbps and above.

The low latency specification was spawned several years ago, when Glennon and other CableLabs engineers brought consumers in and worked with them to determine what specific kinds of bandwidth-intensive applications they’d be using in the future.

It was determined that virtual reality would be a key driver of high-intensity residential broadband consumption. And the current latency of more than 20 milliseconds would not suffice.

“VR needs incredibly low latency between head movement and the delivery of new pixels to your eyes, or you start to feel nauseated,” Glennon said. “To move the PC out of the home, we need to make the communications over the cable network be a millisecond or less round trip. But our DOCSIS technology at the time could not deliver that.”

So what is latency?

“Network latency is the time that elapses between a request for information and its arrival,” CableLabs said on a page outlining the dynamics. “Because it takes time for a signal to pass through wire or fiber, some latency will always be present, but slow servers, inefficient data packing and excessive network hopping can increase delays. One of the main causes of high latency is the increasing demand for attention from various applications competing to use the network, which occurs when too many people are streaming, chatting and playing on their personal devices over the same network at the same time.”

Low Latency DOCSIS, CableLabs said, “decreases latency to just 1 millisecond for many applications by giving latency-sensitive applications a higher priority without slowing down all other data.”

CableLabs, which has outlined a multi-decade plan to one day evolve HFC networks to 10 Gbps transoms, thinks it has a way for the home Wi-Fi network to keep up, too.

The cable industry technology consortium today is introducing what it calls Dual Channel Wi-Fi to its members.

Outlined in a CableLabs blog post, the technology adds a secondary downstream channel in the home network, allowing bandwidth hogging applications like video to be taken off the primary upstream/downstream channel and alleviating congestion.

According to Belai Hamzeh, senior chief technology officer for CableLabs, on both the router and the device need to be enabled with Dual Channel Wi-Fi technology to fully use the technology. But legacy devices benefit in being able to connect to an overall less congested Wi-Fi network.

Hamzeh said that a “significant number” of cable operator-supplied access equipment in U.S. homes can be enabled with Dual Channel Wi-Fi via a simple software upgrade.

He added that 15% of customer service calls for U.S. cable operators are Wi-Fi related, resulting in $600 million of annual costs.

CableLabs said it’s working with Edgewater Wireless, a participant in the inaugural UpRamp Fiterator cohort, to develop Dual Channel implementation for OpenWRT platforms. CableLabs has also developed the code for RDK-B and RDK-V platforms.

CableLabs is positioning Dual Channel Wi-Fi as a compliment to what it calls “10G-ready technology”—a set of tools that also includes Full Duplex DOCSiS, PNH, x-Haul and vRAN, PON, DOCSiS 3.1, P2P Coherent Optics and Los Latency DOCSIS.

When the cable industry launched its “10G” counter-marketing campaign at CES in January, the common interpretation was that the initiative revolved around Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), a CableLabs technology that is expected to eventually deliver 10 Gbps symmetrical broadband speeds.

As it turns out, the branding exercise—intended to counter the wireless industry’s aggressive promotion of next-generation 5G network technologies—is a bit broader than that.

Related: CES: Cable Declares It Won’t Be ‘Second to the Door’ to 5G With ‘10G’ Branding Launch

Speaking at an event produced and covered by Light Reading in Denver last week, CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney described 10G as a “collection of technologies,” including Full Duplex.

In a report issued last week, investment research company Cowen said 10G "is essentially a common platform that will involve a variety of technologies that CableLabs members can pick and choose from, in incremental steps, and that will begin trialing in 2020.

“Specifically, the 10G initiative involves various tools and features including low latency, improved security, a distributed access architecture (DAA, decentralizing the network, virtualizing the headend, and extending the digital/IP aspects of the network for speed/function enhancements), Full Duplex transmission (FDX, high speed in both directions), fiber deep, the N+0 architecture (no amplifiers needed between nodes and HHs), and subsequent meaningful opex/capex benefits,” Cowen added.

Notably, 10G’s collection fo broadband technologies will ultimately allow for speeds as high as 14.2 Gbps, with the “10G” sounding better for marketing. Cisco has noted that there will eventually be a pathway for 25 Gbps down and and 10 Gbps 10 up in the next 5 to 10 years.

Cowen believes that should be enough to ensure that the cable industry enjoys a broadband speed advantage over the next decade.

The research company concedes there is concern in the investment community that cable’s speed advance might be become “overkill,” with 5G stepping in over the next few years, sating a demand for some “killer app” in the home with modest speeds of 100 Gbps - 500 Gbps.

Tier 3 operator Midco, Cowen noted, recently conceded that only 3% of its broadband customers pay for 1-gig services. The research firm estimates that only around 8-10% of customers for Comcast and Charter have 1 Gbps.

Cowen cited Niesen’s Law, which states that consumer broadband demand will continue to increase at a rate of 50% a year. Some operators are being a compound annual growth rate of 35-45% for download speeds. Cowen predicted adoption of 4 Gbps speeds by the mid-2020s, and 10 Gbps speeds thereafter, which it believes will outpace what 5G can deliver.

The “killer apps” of this longer term future could be things like 3D holographic messaging, which would require speeds greater than 800 Gbps, and 360-immersive VR gaming and entertainment.

“We continue to believe the <6 GHz fixed wireless threat will be relegated to niche low-income/rural plays,” Cowen said. 

Eight months after declaring that cable had boldly entered what many consider to be “the most significant technological innovation since the dawn of the Internet,” CableLabs has published list of all the ways that blockchain security can be compromised.

According to Brian Scriber, principal security architect for the cable industry technology consortium, CableLabs’ Security Technologies team has been tracking attacks on blockchain networks, and various compromises, for several years. It’s identified key hazard groupings and security considerations in blockchain projects, some of which Scriber listed in the org’s latest blog post.

These include:

> Smart Contract Injection - No, it’s not as sexy as it sounds. “The smart contract engine is an interpreter for a (sometimes novel) programming language and a parser of data related to the decisions the engine needs to make,” Scriber explained. “The hazard in this situation is when executable code appears inside smart contracts in an effort to subvert the contract language or data. Implementers need to consider sanitizing inputs to smart contracts, proper parsing and error handling.”

> Replay Attacks - “Not only is there a threat in transaction processing and validation, but also in node behavior, authentication, and the securing of confidential messaging,” Scriber wrote. “Adding nonces to check against prior transactions is critical.”

> History Revision Attacks - “Blockchains that rely on fault-tolerant consensus models do well when there are many participating nodes processing, competing and collaborating on the next block,” Scriber said. “When the number of nodes drops, or if there is predictably cyclic behavior, lulls can be leveraged in a history revision attack where a new branch is created, effectively deleting a previously accepted transaction. Designers should consider how to best guarantee minimum support and the diversity of nodes.”

> Permanence Poisoning - "Due to the permanence of blockchains and the cost to fork, it’s possible to sabotage a chain with even claims of illegal content to draw the ire of regulators and law enforcement,” Scriber said.

> Confidential Information Leaks - According to Scriber, “Permanence increases the risk of data being exfiltrated out of the chain. Even encrypted data is at risk for future threats against those algorithms or brute-force attacks. Designers need to make sure that they understand the data being stored, how it is protected, who owns it and how it could be re-associated with any pseudonymized users.”

These are just a few of the attacks listed by Scriber.

Notably, the posting comes just a few weeks after Comcast and Charter announced a partnership with Viacom to build a blockchain-enabled addressable advertising exchange. 

The NCTA is partnering with CableLabs and Cable Europe to try to steal some of the marketing thunder from 5G wireless chest-thumpers at CES this week.

The orgs will convene a 9 a.m. Wednesday morning event at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas, aiming to hype what they’re calling “10G.”

“Industry leaders from NCTA, CableLabs and member companies will participate,” the announcement said.

The event, titled “The Future of the Broadband Network,” will showcase emerging multi-gigabit-capable HFC technologies including Full Duplex DOCSIS and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS—technologies, the cable industry believes, that are being overlooked amid what it sees as the wireless industry’s latest marketing gizmo, 5G. 

As for the "10G," it's a reference to the 10 Gbps speeds that Full Duplex's backers believe will be widely delivered by the technology in a few years.

“With groundbreaking, scalable capacity and speeds, the 10G platform is the wired network of the future that will power the digital experiences and imaginations of consumers for years to come,” said NCTA president and CEO Michael Powell, in a statement. “As an industry, we are dedicated to delivering an exceptional national infrastructure that will power digital advancement and propel our innovation economy into the future.”

Related: NCTA’s Powell: 5G is 25% Technology, 75% Marketing

It was Powell who, at the SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo Show in Atlanta in October, who lamented the fact that cable wasn’t doing enough to market “10G.”

Notably, in its announcement today, NCTA indicated that it has even trademarked the term "10G."

In fact, it's an industry-wide initiative, with Arris among the companies today rendering blog posts tub-thumping 10G.

“CableLabs creates the technology that supports the deployment of high-capacity broadband networks and gigabit services at scale for the industry,” added CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney. “With the 10G platform, CableLabs will help ensure the broadband infrastructure will be in place globally with the capacity and performance needed in the future to fuel new innovations and emerging technologies that will transform and enhance the way we live.”

CableLabs has filed suit against Buckeye Broadband in a Colorado federal court, claiming the Ohio cable operator hasn’t paid its dues all year, Cablefax reports.

The journal said Buckeye, which is owned by Block Communications, decided to pull out of the industry consortium at the beginning of 2018, and has not paid its Q1, Q2 and Q3 dues. CableLabs, meanwhile, is reportedly digging in, holding the operator to a three-year-notice requirement that wouldn’t leave it eligible to leave the organization cleanly until Jan. 21, 2021.

CableLabs said it can't comment on pending litigation, while Block Communications commenting. The suit was filed Friday in Colorado District Court.

Buckeye’s decision to leave CableLabs, an organization it joined in 1992, reportedly came after the consortium announced its 2018 dues, which were determined to by 0.05157% of the members revenue from cable services from the previous quarter. 

Buckeye remains listed on CableLabs list of member companies. 

With more of its constituents expanding their home automation and security businesses, CableLabs has introduced a new network framework called Micronets designed to provide enterprise-level security in the IoT environment.

The so-called Micronets framework has the ability to restrict and quarantine a device placed on the network that’s deemed to be a risk. It also provides enhanced network protection against hacking for “high-value” devices. The technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify the fine-tuning of security controls.

The technology is built on well-established Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies that leverage device fingerprinting and dynamic identity techniques to automatically organize all network-connected devices into separate trust domains, or micronets, managing the connectivity between them.

CableLabs said the Micronets platform allows for easy onboarding of new devices with minimal user expertise.

CableLabs has published a white paper on the technology, that’s available here.

“CableLabs Micronets delivers a streamlined user experience with seamless onboarding and authentication of all devices, while providing enterprise-style network security and control for all connections to the network,” said Michael Glenn, VP of security technologies at CableLabs, in a statement. “Users have full control over which devices are added, and CableLabs Micronets automatically monitors and segments devices into separate, policy-driven trust domains to protect the devices, data and the user.”

Around 63% of U.S. housing units have access to gigabit-or-higher internet speeds, according to data released Thursday by CableLabs.

Of those housing units, 74% of them exist in a cable company’s footprint.

The rise of gigabit-speed access has been steep. Access has increased 7% just in the last three months, the jointly operated cable industry consortium said. And as recently as December 2016, only 4% of U.S. domiciles had gigabit speed access.

“Cable’s deployment of high-capacity broadband networks is enabling the gigabit services of today and the symmetric multi-gigabit services of tomorrow,” said Mark Walker, director of technology policy for CableLabs, in a blog post. “With the wide availability of gigabit service and beyond, the broadband infrastructure is in place to power emerging technologies that will transform and enhance our lives through immersive entertainment, next-generation healthcare and a re-imagination of education and work.”

The CBRS Alliance declared its first interoperability test a success and that its branded, LTE-based technology OnGo has “imminent” opportunities for commercial applications.

“While there have been a number of recent accomplishments toward commercial deployment, the technical achievements showcased by our members at last week’s interoperability test event was by far one of the most significant milestones to date,” said Dave Wright, president of the CBRS Alliance, in a statement. “After a successful round of interoperability tests and with initial commercial deployment  on the horizon, we are confident that OnGo-enabled business opportunities are imminent.”

The interop took place last week at CableLabs’ headquarters in Louisville, Colorado and drew more than 20 Alliance member companies, including five of the nation’s Spectrum Access System (SAS) administrators: Amdocs, CommScope, Federated Wireless, Google, and Sony. The event also featured a number of telecom industry vendors, including Arris’ Ruckus Networks division, Ericsson and Airspan.

According to the CBRS Alliance, SAS Administrators fostered more than 50 successful interactions, executing a 98% test completion rate with no recorded failures. The interactions tested the critical functions required for support of all the use cases the CBRS Alliances as identified as most relevant for spectrum sharing in the 3.4 GHz band, including mobile network densification, fixed wireless, neutral host and private LTE for both enterprise and industrial IoT use.

Cable and wireless operators are exploring opportunities for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service Device band, a 150 MHz-wide portion of largely underused spectrum existing between 3.55 GHz and 3.7 GHz. CBRS will ultimately be used for private LTE networks such as airports and industrial campuses.

Comcast, Charter Communications and Altice USA are each currently testing various CBRS applications.

By the end of the year, the CBRS Alliance said it expects to have nearly a dozen labs set up around the world to conduct testing for its OnGo certification of the technology.

The FCC, meanwhile, is still reviewing the rules for CBRS deployment, but the CBRS Alliance expects that the General Authorized Access portion of the band will begin being used for commercial applications by the end of 2018.

###

ANAHEIM, Calif, — With broadband speeds doubling every two years, operators need to focus on innovation, network reliability and connectivity to drive results, experts said at The Independent Show.

CableLabs chief operating officer Chris Lammers noted that, according to Nielsen’s Law, high-end users’ bandwidth needs will grow by 50% every two years. With that in mind, Lammers said ultimate speeds will rise from 1 Gigabit per second in 2016-17 to 10 Gbps by 2023 and 100 Gbps by 2029.

Operators need to ensure their networks are up to snuff to deliver higher speeds and to know who their competition really is, Shentel senior vice president of cable Tom Whitaker said. While 5G wireless is getting a lot of press, in many cases the technology isn’t economically feasible for small communities.

Whitaker pointed to a Verizon Communications 5G deployment in Houston that cost the telco about $15.50 per covered point of presence (POP). In a smaller market, such as Lexington, Va., 5G could cost $55 per covered POP.

“Maybe 4G is a better option, a better long-term solution for many wireless networks in most of the small towns where we do business,” Whitaker said. “So, I wouldn’t get all jacked up about 5G unless it’s in a bigger town.”

Deploying fiber also has a halo effect on the entire company, said TDS Telecom director of product management and development Scott Schultz. While TDS does better in areas where it has deployed fiber, the halo the network gets from offering the service extends to areas it hasn’t upgraded yet. Take rates for copper-based services increased about 9% in neighborhoods that haven’t gotten the full fiber treatment yet, Schultz said.

“Even when you don’t have fiber to add, it works,” Schultz said.

Anaheim – With broadband speeds doubling every two years, operators need to focus on innovation, network reliability and connectivity to drive results, a panel of experts said at a Monday (July 31) panel session at The Independent Show here.

Read More: MCN's Coverage of The Independent Show

CableLabs chief operating officer Chris Lammers noted that according to Nielsen's Law, high-end users’ bandwidth needs will grow by 50% every two years. With that in mind, Lammers said ultimate speeds will rise from 1 Gigabit per second in 2016-17, to 10 Gbps by 2023 and 100 Gbps by 2029.

ShenTel senior vice president, cable Tom Whitaker said operators need to make sure their networks are up to snuff to deliver higher and to know who their completion really is. While 5G wireless is getting a lot of press, in many cases the technology isn’t economically feasible for small communities.

Whitaker pointed to a Verizon Communications 5G deployment in Houston that cost the telco about $15.50 per covered POP. In a smaller market, like Lexington, Va., 5G could cost $55 per covered POP.

“Maybe 4G is a better option, a better long-term solution for many wireless networks in most of the small towns where we do business. So, I wouldn’t get all jacked up about 5G unless it’s in a bigger town,” Whitaker said.

Deploying fiber also has a halo effect on the entire company, said TDS Telecom director of product management and development Scott Schultz. While TDS does better in areas where it has deployed fiber, the halo the network gets from offering the service extends to areas it hasn’t upgraded yet. Take rates for copper-based services increased about 9% in neighborhoods that haven’t gotten the full fiber treatment yet, Schultz said.

“Even when you don’t have fiber to add, it works,” Schultz said. 

Teltoo, a startup focused on bringing scale to OTT-delivered live video services, has moved to the U.S. and opened a headquarters in Boulder, Colo.

The company, which will continue to keep its technical team based in Madrid, Spain, said it has also raised a round of funding. The amount has not been disclosed, but the company confirmed that Liberty Global is among Teltoo’s financial backers.

The move to Boulder also follows Teltoo’s involvement in UpRamp’s “Fiterator” program. That initiative, run by the CableLabs-backed startup accelerator, enables its selections to get exposure with cable operators alongside guaranteed commercial deals. In exchange, UpRamp gets a small equity stake (typically in the form of warrants) in the startups selected for the program.

RELATED: Four Startups Picked for CableLabs-Backed UpRamp Program

Teltoo completed the Fiterator program late last year.

Being in Boulder will keep Teltoo close to CableLabs, which is based in nearby Louisville, a growing tech startup community that has found a home in the Denver area, as well as content delivery companies such as CenturyLink (which now owns what used to be Level3 Communications, based in Broomfield), and Fastly, which has a presence in the Mile High City.

“Overall, we saw this was a good place to be,” Teltoo co-founder and CEO (and a former HP employee) Pablo Hesse said.

Teltoo, he said, has started a search for a COO and another sales exec to be based in the Colorado office.

Teltoo is focused on a software-driven, distributed architecture that can scale and improve the performance of live video streaming while also helping service providers conserve bandwidth. Per an earlier discussion with the company, Teltoo’s approach involves a small piece of JavaScript that is installed on the partner’s streaming video player for web browsers, mobile devices and even TV-connected devices. Working in tandem with servers, the platform manages the connections while a live stream is being delivered.

RELATED: Startup Pitches Cable-Friendly P2P Play

Liberty Global and RTVE, Spain’s state broadcaster, are among those that have been working with Teltoo in the early going. 

Englewood, Colo. – Full-fledged deployments of Full Duplex (FDX) DOCSIS are likely still a couple of years away, but CableLabs believes that suppliers have made enough progress to be ready for initial interoperability testing later this year.

Interops are expected to underway in earnest in 2019, but the start of that work could get underway by the fourth quarter of 2018, Doug Jones, principal architect at CableLabs, said here Wednesday (June 6) at an operations roundtable that was part of the Rocky Mountain SCTE Chapter’s 23rd annual Engineering Symposium. 

That work will help to establish important groundwork on product interoperability for FDX DOCSIS, an annex to the DOCSIS 3.1 specs that will support symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds on widely deployed hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks.

CableLabs released the physical layer specs for FDX DOCSIS last fall, and followed with the addition of MAC Layer support in January.

RELATED: Full Duplex DOCSIS Takes Another Step Forward

Though the prescribed path to FDX DOCSIS involved a node-plus-zero network (the creation of a passive network whereby there are no amplifiers between the node and the home), CableLabs is also working on other approaches that won’t necessarily require N+0 to get MSOs started on that path, Jones noted.

CableLabs, he explained, is building a plan based on a node-plus-five environment. “We’re going to prove that FDX equipment will work on that, as a path toward FDX DOCSIS and get you that 1-Gig symmetrical tier maybe without having to go node-plus-zero first,” Jones said.

Having some flexibility is important because HFC networks are far from uniform between cable operators and even inside the operators themselves. Some have segments of the network at node-plus-15 and others at node-plus-zero, and everything in between.

And there are major business decisions to consider with moving to N+0.

“There’s a big battle that exists out there on cost that’s going to keep thwarting node-plus-zero for a while,” said Tom Gorman, the founder and president of opXL, and a cable engineering exec late of operators such as Comcast and Charter Communications.

By way of example, he said some plant extensions still require an amplifier to boost the signal.

“There’s got to be a very concerted effort and plan and willingness to spend to get to that node-plus-zero [architecture],” Gorman said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done there.”

And as cable operators take fiber deeper into the network, Gorman warned that they must be careful to ensure that their workforces continue to support technicians who know their way around coax.

“We’re finding that there’s not enough people to splice coax,” Gorman said. “The coax splicing is becoming the dying art, and [cable operators] still have a ton of coax out there. That’s where there’s a hole that’s getting bigger and bigger.”

The panel, moderated by Leslie Ellis, president of EllisEdits and a Multichannel News contributor, also touched cable’s role with 5G, and how MSOs can participate in that evolution amid the move to a standard that will deliver higher speeds and lower latencies and will be enabled in part by small cells that can be backhauled by cable’s widely deployed HFC plant and growing fiber networks.

RELATED: Cable is Wired for 5G

Cable’s move to FDX DOCSIS and distributed access architectures make HFC suitable for dense, 5G microcells, Dan Rice, vice president of HFC architecture at Comcast, said.

“All [telecom companies] are headed to the same spot, with fiber to remote nodes and physical layers out in the node, he said.

RELATED: Need to Know: 5G-Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

Gorman added that future 5G applications such as low-latency connectivity for autonomous vehicles, will present new challenges and opportunities for the cable industry.

Cable will need to focus the accuracy, reliably and availability of those 5G networks.

“The applications for [5G] will be lifeline applications, and it just makes our plant reliability all the more important,” Gorman said. “This is critical stuff we’re talking about beyond that 5G can deliver more bandwidth wirelessly.”

More details from this panel, including cable’s work with Full Duplex DOCSIS and the emerging use of machine learning for cable network operations will be featured in the June 11 issue of Broadcasting & Cable. 

5G may be the hottest thing in wireless and mobile technology, but the new standard needs one thing more than any other: wires, and lots of them.

For the cable industry, 5G offers a huge opportunity for new fixed and mobile wireless services, using cable’s core asset: endless miles of wires in the form of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture and a growing mix of fiber-only pipes. Optical fiber cable are thin strands of glass that carry massive volumes of data with light signals and minimum loss, and coaxial cable is the traditional lines cable operators use to deliver video, voice and data services to most customers.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

HFC “is an excellent vehicle for that because it provides power, right of way and backhaul for all of that small-cell radio equipment,” Craig Cowden, vice president of wireless technology at Charter Communications, said during a recent webinar on the topic hosted by CableLabs. “Whether we’re talking inside the home or outside the home, we believe cable is going to be the first truly scalable fixed mobile convergence platform.”

In other words, it may be a wireless network, but it’s going to need a lot of cells, and those cells need to be connected a wired network, including the kind that cable can provide.

Low Latency Needed

But in order to make that work across cable’s mix of fiber-only and HFC networks, operators need a low-latency solution. The cable industry is taking aim at that with a proposed technique called the “Bandwidth Report” (BWR), which aims to deliver super-low latencies by extending a technical bridge between cable’s high-speed DOCSIS network (used today for cable modem service) and 4G/LTE and “pipelining” the upstream packet schedulers of both sides.

Recent trials of BWR conducted by CableLabs and Cisco Systems showed that “DOCSIS is well positioned as a viable backhaul technology for LTE,” John Chapman, a fellow at Cisco and chief technology officer of the company’s Cable Access unit, proclaimed.

Cable operators are particularly interested in a 150 Megahertz-wide batch of spectrum known as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which resides in the historically underutilized range of 3.55 Gigahertz to 3.7 GHz.

“The 3.5-GHz band remains an important component of Charter’s wireless strategy,” the MSO told the FCC in a recent filing. Charter noted that it has been able to produce speeds of at least 25 Megabits per second downstream and 3 Mbps upstream in the so-called CBRS band tests being conducted in rural areas.

“Charter is certainly looking at that [CBRS] as a potential small cell technology that we would deploy both in the home and outdoors,” Cowden said on the CableLabs webinar.

Charter Communications is testing 5G-based technology in at least six markets with technology partners such as Samsung Electronics: Orlando, Fla.; Reno, Nev.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ohio; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Grand Rapids, Mich.

Comcast, meanwhile, has also asked the FCC for permission to conduct tests using the CBRS band in the Philadelphia area.

Other rival 5G tests underway:

• AT&T has been testing pre-standard 5G fixed wireless in Austin and Waco, Texas; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and South Bend, Ind., and intends to introduce mobile 5G-based service in 12 markets by late 2018.

• Verizon Communications plans to launch 5G-based residential broadband service in four markets in 2018, including Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif. Verizon estimates that the markets included in that initial launch will span some 30 million homes.

• T-Mobile is accelerating its 600 MHz rollout this year, setting the stage for initial launches in 2019 and a nationwide 5G network by 2020.

• Sprint plans to launch a mobile 5G network in the first half of 2019 leaning on its portfolio of 2.5 GHz spectrum.

• Starry is using millimeter wave spectrum to deliver an uncapped, symmetrical 200 Mbps service in parts of Boston, with beta offerings available in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Other markets on Starry’s launch list include New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami and Minneapolis.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about 5G — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from NewBay on 5G:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and ProAV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

Taking aim at an emerging opportunity driven by today’s LTE networks and the 5G networks of tomorrow, CableLabs is establishing a Mobile Backhaul R&D Lab.

The new lab is being created to support cable’s development of mobile backhaul-over-DOCSIS networks, Jennifer Andreoli-Fang, distinguished technologist, wireless technologies, at CableLabs, noted in this blog post.

CableLabs is targeting this area as network operators seek out backhaul solutions that can support their move to dense, small cell architectures. CableLabs and others in the industry believe that hybrid/fiber coax (HFC) networks – and their trifecta of location, power and capacity – offer a great (and potentially lucrative) fit.

To that end, CableLabs and its partners have been working on specs that enable DOCSIS networks to serve as a mobile backhaul conduit, and CableLabs has posted a whitepaper from Andreoli-Fang and Belal Hamzeh, VP of wireless at CableLabs, that provides an update on those efforts.

The paper provides an overview of some advances made on that front, and the special needs of mobile backhaul, in areas such as bandwidth, latency and timing.

Of recent note, CableLabs and Cisco Systems announced that a test of a “Bandwidth Report” proposal (and an associated “pipelining” of the DOCSIS and LTE schedulers) showed that upstream latency for LTE data backhaul on a DOCSIS network could be reduced to about 1.1 milliseconds – well within the range of a latency goal of sub-5 milliseconds.

RELATED: CableLabs-Cisco Trial Successfully Extends Bridge Between DOCSIS and LTE

Though the test was focused on LTE, the proposal is designed to be extensible to future 5G networks. 

CableLabs has promoted Rachel Beisel to senior vice president and chief marketing officer, a move that comes more than a year after she joined the Louisville, Colo.-based organization as VP of marketing and communications.  

In this expanded role, Beisel said her top priority is focused on adding “more depth and breadth in our membership,” noting that CableLabs has divergent stakeholders that go beyond service providers to include vendors, the startup community (via its UpRamp program), outside the industry (with its Kyrio unit), as well as with licensing and standards bodies and other organizations.  

RELATED: Wireless Is Waxing at CableLabs’ Kyrio Unit 

She said CableLabs will also look to deepen its collaboration with industry organizations such as SCTE/ISBE, CTAM and the NCTA -- The Internet & Television Association.  

“We are evaluating the different channels in which we communicate,” Beisel said.  

She will also be more focused on events and events strategy, as those functions been rolled up into the marketing and communications division of CableLabs, which hosted an Inform[ED] event earlier this month in London.  

Beisel, who hails from Nashville, is also a guest lecturer at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the MBA program, focusing on how technology has becoming an increasingly important part of modern marketing programs.  

She’s also a cycling enthusiast. In addition to entering events (next month’s Haute Route event in Colorado is on the docket), Beisel also works with blind and visually impaired athletes, piloting/guiding them on tandem bikes, and last year was part of a tandem that won a national championship title for the Hill Climb National Championship race at Pikes Peak.  

The presidents and CEOs of three industry organizations will share the stage in a joint panel at Cable-Tec Expo 2018, set for Oct. 22-25 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

The panel, to be part of the show’s opening general session on Tuesday, Oct. 23, will feature Michael Powell, president and CEO of the NCTA — The Internet & Television Association; Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs; and Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE/ISBE, the organization that’s putting on the annual event.

The panel, titled, An Integrated Circuit: Closing the Links Between Innovation, Deployment and ROI, will be moderated by Tony Werner, president, technology and product, Comcast Cable.

SCTE/ISBE announced last week that Pat Esser, president of Cox Communications, will keynote the show’s opening general session.

Kevin Hart, EVP and chief product and technology officer of Cox, is serving as program chair for this year’s Cable-Tec Expo.

Last fall’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver drew 8,800 registered attendees.

“The cable industry’s leadership in deploying new technologies has been a cornerstone of our mission to provide consumers with services that make their lives better,” Powell, said in a statement. “As technology continues to transform connectivity and entertainment, our organizations will lay the foundation for rapid implementation of next-generation products that will continue to meet consumer demand.”

“When we look at the next 10 years, we see tremendous opportunities not only for cable but for cable’s impact on healthcare, education, automotive, and any industry that requires access to high-speed broadband,” added McKinney. “The close relationship with NCTA and SCTE•ISBE helps the industry deploy CableLabs’ innovations to the benefit of those customers.”

“SCTE•ISBE’s applied science mission is fundamental to bringing the vision of NCTA’s members and CableLabs’ innovators to life,” said Dzuban. “Our collaboration with both organizations has spurred development of training, certification, and standards that have helped to accelerate the time-to-market and ROI for products that are maintaining cable’s competitive edge.”

Louisville, Colo. -- The hunting appears to be pretty good these days at Kyrio, the for-profit unit of CableLabs that has been seeking business growth opportunities both inside and outside the cable industry.  

Kyrio, a spin-off formed in 2012 and originally called NetworkFX (rebranded as Kyrio in 2016), cut its teeth in cable device security using a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) service. It has been expanding into several emerging areas, including mobile and wireless, the Internet of Things, as well as interoperability work centered on network functions virtualization (NFV). While some of those activities have attracted business from companies and industries outside of cable, Kyrio has also taken the reins on DOCSIS certification testing.  

RELATED: Kyrio Takes Over CableLabs Certification Testing Program 

Out of all the opportunities being worked on now or being targeted, wireless is currently the biggest one being pursued, Mitchell Ashley, president and GM of Kyrio, said in a briefing here at the CableLabs headquarters.  

WiFi performance testing (for metro WiFi networks as well as in-home WiFi products and technologies) are the largest component of that part of the business, though Kyrio has started to do some testing around 5G. All of that work complements other wireless-facing work Kyrio has undertaken, including a WiFi roaming service/hub that some cable operators, including Midco, have taken advantage of.  

Louisville, Colo.-based Kyrio, which has even rented out a two-story home in the area to help with real-world WiFi performance testing, also expects increasing interest in the emerging CBRS band to also factor into future business.  

RELATED: Comcast Wants to Test CBRS in Philly 

Part of the WiFi testing tends to center access point performance, as well as new whole-home setups that employ extenders and other whole-home gear and software.  

RELATED: Whole-Home WiFi Heats Up 

Kyrio’s being tapped in part by vendors and suppliers for product testing because the division is made to be neutral and independent, and can also serve as an extension of their own in-house labs. Others simply don't have the resources that Kyrio affords them. 

“We don’t have a dog in the hunt on what’s chosen,” Ashley said. “The data is the data…The results speak for themselves.”  

Kyrio has also taken its PKI infrastructure for set-tops and modems and offered that capability to the IoT market, enabling the same security mechanisms and technology to validate and authenticate this new wave of connected devices in a sort of digital ticket exchange.  

RELATED: Kyrio Teams on IoT Device Security 

“IoT has a lot of promise” for Kyrio’s business, Ashley explained.  

Another emerging area for Kyrio is NVF interoperability. Some of that work involves a lab that lets vendors come in to create multi-device scenarios and develop proof of concepts.  

Interoperable, multi-vendor environments represent both a challenge and a promise for NVP, explained Robin Ku, director of Kyrio’s NFV Interop Lab, which is sponsored by Intel and Amdocs. 

Some of that work has involved expanding the NFV ecosystem to support a greater number of virtual applications that can be tested in those interoperable settings.  

“But you have to walk before you run,” Ku said, adding that NFV has “a high degree of interest from MSOs”  

Denver – Whether it involves technical specifications or plans involving trials or deployments, the cable industry continues to push ahead with next-generation, distributed access network architectures that will help to pave the way to the virtualization.

But there’s still some uncertainty in terms of the speed at which those transitions will get under way as MSOs look to distributed access architectures (DAA) to push fiber deeper into their networks and enable higher fidelity digital optics, while also reducing the space and power requirements of their headend and hub sites.

While 34% of operators surveyed last year expected to have preparations for distributed access architectures (DAA) underway in 2018, the expectation now is that bigger deployments will likely get pushed into 2019, Jeff Heynen, consulting director at SNL Kagan, said here Wednesday at Light Reading’s Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies event.

Still, “it’s very clear…that distributed access is going to be a major factor in terms of the revenue tie” for cable access network technology,” he said.

RELATED: Forecast Gets a Fix on Next-Gen Cable Network Tech Spending

CableLabs, meanwhile, has been moving forward with specs for DAA and Distributed CCAP Architectures (DCA) that aim to ensure interoperability between suppliers. Taken together, CableLabs’s DAA-facing efforts include several areas such as Remote PHY, Remote MACPHY, and Full Duplex DOCSIS, and its work with coherent optics.

Jon Schnoor, lead engineer, wired technologies at CableLabs, said the specs for Remote PHY are nearing an end, with 11 interop events already completed, and have already moved into the qualification stage. Spec writing for Remote MACPHY, which introduced a new component called the MAC Manager, is underway.

RELATED: CableLabs Moves Ahead with Remote MAC/PHY

In addition to Remote PHY devices (RPD), CableLabs’s work also extends to include a new device called a Remote MAC Device (RMD) that moves the CCAP functionality into the node.

As part of some phase II work, CableLabs and its constituents are also working on something called the Remote MAC Core, which can be put in the node, headend or hub. That, Schnoor explained, will give operators the flexibility to put that functionality wherever they need it on depending on their power and space limitations.

Phase III, with a 2019 timeframe, will aim to virtualize the DCA portion of DAA, and utilize a software-powered control plane.

These approaches should enable operators to distribute more functions toward the edges of the network over time and free up space in headends and hubs, or possibly eliminate the need for them altogether.

MSOs, meanwhile, are also moving ahead with DAA and virtualization plans as that work at CableLabs continues.

WideOpenWest, for example, has teamed with Nokia on a Remote MACPHY initiative that is initially focused in Cleveland and Chicago.

Cash Hagan, WOW’s chief operating officer, said new nodes are going in today, with an initial focus on saturated parts of the network. Later this year, WOW will expand that work into additional markets, and will also start to install a distributed access node anytime one needs to be cracked open, he added.

Hagan said a key driver is to build more capacity into the network while achieving other capex and opex benefits that it gets as it cuts down on space and power needs in headends and hubs. “The only way to get there is by distributing the network,” Hagan said.

Comcast is also pursuing a DAA initiative with a focus on Remote PHY, which it says can add value in a number of different architectural models currently in place in its network.

In addition to the power and space benefits, it will also simplify the network and enable Comcast to get a real-time view into the performance of its network.

With service reliability being a paramount factor, having that instant visibility into the network “is critical to everything we want to do going forward,” Elad Nafshi, Comcast’s senior vice president, next generation access network, said here during a keynote later in the day.

Nafshi, who sees the access network becoming an epicenter of cable innovation, also confirmed that Comcast’s DAA activities will focus on Remote PHY.

Following the launch of a Coherent Optics specification project about a year ago, CableLabs followed up this week with Full Duplex Coherent Optics, an effort that aims to beef up fiber capacity and enable the technology to work on fibers in cable access networks.

RELATED: CableLabs Eyes Coherent Tech go Give HFC a Future-Proofing Capacity Boost 

Per this blog post by Steve Jia, distinguished technologist, wired technologies at CableLabs (with contributions from CableLabs Fellow Dr. Alberto Campos), the Colorado-based cable R&D organization claims that Full Duplex Coherent Optics will enable the following set of capabilities:

-Double the bi-directional capacity of each fiber;

-Multiply the capacity of each existing access network fiber by over 200 times; and,

-Make Coherent Optics technology well suited for deployment in many more cable access network fibers.

Under the current plan, the new scheme will be incorporated into the ongoing CableLabs P2P Coherent Optics spec effort, which is targeting a release in mid-2018. The Full Duplex Coherent Optics initiative is moving ahead even as work continues on Full Duplex DOCSIS, an annex to DOCSIS 3.1 that targeting multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds over HFC networks.

RELATED: Full Duplex DOCSIS Plows Ahead 

Last year, CableLabs said it had figured out a way to adapt point-to-point coherent technology, in use for decades for long-haul networks, to work with short-haul access networks, holding that the move would enable MSOs to mine more capacity out of their HFC networks by “more than 1,000 times.”

In this week’s post, Jia reiterated that cable’s interest in coherent optics stemmed from the “somewhat limited fiber count between the headend and the fiber node” and the need to maximize the capacity of this scarce resource.

He noted that there are two fundamental topologies to achieve bidirectional P2P coherent transport -- dual-fiber and single-fiber – adding that a survey of MSOs found that 20% of existing cable access networks use a single-fiber topology whereby downstream and upstream transmission to nodes takes place on a single strand of fiber. CableLabs, Jia added, sees this single-fiber topology rising to 60% over the next five years among MSOs.

While dual-fiber requires a second fiber (one for the downstream and another for the upstream), the single-fiber approach transmits the up and down at different wavelengths using two lasers. The first option is difficult because of the fiber scarcity and the second one – the addition of another laser – is expensive.

CableLabs is proposing an alternative that uses two optical circulators (characterized as low-cost, passive, but directional devices) on each end in a special configuration.

“Instead of using two fibers, a single fiber is connected for bidirectional transmission,” Jia said. “Most importantly, instead of using two lasers, a single laser is employed for single-fiber coherent systems.”

Regarding its application to cable and the use of direction-division multiplexing in the optical domain, the claim is that it can double the whole fiber system capacity, and can work with 100G, 200G and future 400G systems.

CableLabs also said this works for short and long wavelengths, as its Optical Center of Excellence has tested it at distances of up to 100 kilometers.

UpRamp, the CableLabs-backed accelerator for startups, said it has opened up applications for the third cohort of its 14-week “Fiterator” program.

UpRamp has set a May 4 deadline for applications.

RELATED: Startup Pitches Cable-Friendly P2P Play (subscription required)

UpRamp, a program introduced in February 2016, enables its cohort selections to get valuable exposure with cable operators and guaranteed commercial deals. In exchange, UpRamp gets a small equity stake (as warrants) in the startups that are selected.

RELATED: UpRamp Gets Small Stake in Startup Selections

Here’s a snapshot of startups from the first two cohorts that completed UpRamp’s Fiterator program:

-Teltoo: Software-based solution to help MSOs distribute live OTT video at scale. 

-DeviceBits: A.I.-focused customer service software.

-Bansen Labs: Focused on improving the quality of life for people with disabilities, its first product, Xogo, works with devices such as set-tops and gaming consoles.

-MediaHound: Personalized video search and discovery.

-Edgewater Wireless: WiFi infrastructure.

-VelociData: Advanced data services

-Trinity Mobile Networks: Focused on the integration of WiFi and mesh networks alongside cellular connections).

Kyrio, the for-profit unit of CableLabs, has teamed with Microchip to develop embedded device security for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector.

Kyrio said it is the first certificate authority and Microchip Security Design Partner as part of an effort aimed at driving scale into IoT device security.

RELATED: CableLabs Unit Tackles IoT Testing

“The mission of this partnership is to embed IoT devices with digital certificates in secure hardware in a way that integrates well with hardware manufacturing process flows,” Ron Ih, director of business development at Kyrio, explained in this blog post. “This strategy will make it easy for IoT device manufacturers to enable enterprise-grade security without needing to be security experts.”

He noted that providing high security for networked devices historically requires complex back-end security software, security specialists, and processes “that did not fit well with hardware manufacturing flows,” and represents a situation that’s not sustainable with an IoT world that is seeing the number of connected devices explode.

RELATED: Kyrio Takes Over CableLabs Certification Testing Program

“IoT devices – from lightbulbs to cars – need security at the core, not as an afterthought,” Ih added. “By providing a strong managed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that fits within the existing design flow and supply chain familiar to device manufacturers, we are moving closer to the standardization the IoT industry requires to grow securely,” Ih explained.

RELATED: CableLabs Rebrands Security Spin-Off

Microchip, he said, already works with customers in several markets, including consumer, automotive, communications and industrial control.

Though Kyrio is the first certificate authority for Microchip’s Design Partner Program, other companies involved with it include cloud providers such as Google, Afero and Amazon Web Services, CycloneCrypto (a stack provider), and Cerberus, a design house based in the U.K.

Charter Communications plans to center its coming mobile and wireless strategies on an approach that will increasingly lean on a network of small cells that taps into both unlicensed and licensed spectrum.

“Eventually we’ll transition from a WiFi-first MVNO to a small cell-first MVNO,” Craig Cowden, SVP of wireless technology at Charter, said Thursday during a CableLabs-hosted webinar that focused on a new “Bandwidth Report” technique that aims to position cable’s DOCSIS networks as a viable backhaul platform for 4G and future 5G-based small cell deployments.

RELATED: CableLabs-Cisco Trial Successfully Extends Bridge Between DOCSIS and LTE

Charter plans to launch a mobile service later this year that uses its MVNO agreement with Verizon and the MSO’s own WiFi network.

“We’re wholesaling network capacity from a wireless carrier for the broad umbrella coverage of mobility service, but we want to put as much of our traffic onto our own infrastructure as possible,” Cowden said. “We want to put as much traffic onto our WiFi infrastructure as we can.”

That approach ties in tightly with Charter’s already stated “inside-out” strategy, which is on the opposite end of the mobile industry’s outside-in focus of building a macro architecture from the outside and then increasing their penetration indoors.

“We want to build our infrastructure from within the home and then opportunistically build outdoors, where there is traffic density to justify that build,” Cowden said, noting that about 80% of wireless traffic takes place inside homes and offices.

Though unlicensed WiFi will play a big role in that strategy early on, Charter will be looking to expand on that by using small cells that tap into licensed spectrum.

"We will first start with 4G small cells,” he said. “And then as 5G technology develops, we'll look at that as well…We believe we can offer a superior connectivity experience.”

And Charter will be looking at various spectrum options, including low frequency bands, as low as 600 MHz as well as millimeter wave.

RELATED: Charter Puts Wireless Broadband to the Test (subscription required)

Cowden said Charter is “particularly interested” in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) 3.5 GHz band, which is being set up as a shared environment for incumbents users (like the U.S.  Navy) as well as licensed (Priority Access License, or PAL) and unlicensed (General Authorized Access, or GAA) access. About 70 MHz of the 150 MHz in that band is being earmarked for the licensed PAL pool.  

The FCC is working on rules for that band and decisions that emerge will help to determine how it will be rolled out and impact how aggressive cable operators and others might pursue using it.

“Charter is certainly looking at that [CBRS] as a potential small cell technology that we would deploy both in the home and outdoor,” Cowden said.

RELATED: Comcast Wants to Test CBRS in Philly

He also talked up how the industry’s widely distributed wireline networks are well positioned to support a pervasive small cell infrastructure.

HFC “is an excellent vehicle for that because it provides power, right of way and backhaul for all of that small cell radio equipment,” he said. “Whether we're talking inside the home or outside the home, we believe cable is going to be the first truly scalable fixed mobile convergence platform.”

But in order to make that work across a DOCSIS network, operators need a low-latency solution, he stressed, referencing the recent BWR work that’s being done to close that gap.

Serving up a potential breakthrough that could factor heavily into cable’s future deployments of small cell networks, CableLabs and Cisco Systems said recent tests of a proposed technique called the “Bandwidth Report” (BWR) prove that super-low latencies can be achieved by extending a technical bridge between DOCSIS and LTE.

While the goal of the BWR test was to achieve upstream latencies of sub-5 milliseconds, the test, following some manual tuning of this “pipelining” of the DOCSIS and LTE schedulers, reduced latency to about 1.1 milliseconds.

“So, it worked,” John Chapman, a fellow at Cisco Systems who is also CTO of the company’s  Cable Access unit, proclaimed Thursday during a CableLabs-hosted webinar entitled Enabling Cable Networks for Mobile Backhaul.

The test, they said, shows that DOCSIS can become a viable backhaul for LTE and could play a major role as cable operators start to develop LTE-based small cell networks, and as they also look to complement their mobile and wireless strategies using the CBRS [Citizens Broadband Radio Service] 3.5 GHz band.

RELATED: Comcast Wants to Test CBRS in Philly

Notably, the BWR proposal is also extensible to future 5G networks, Chapman explained.

But the issue that’s being solved with BWR is to reduce inherent upstream latency in DOCSIS networks to a level that is required for 4G and 5G small cells – certainly beneath the 5 millisecond mark.

So, in order to play that key backhaul role, DOCSIS must provide a low latency path between neighboring small cells, Jennifer Andreoli-Fang, a distinguished technologist at CableLabs, said.

BWR, a method that was described in detail at last fall’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, aims to overcome a mismatch between the schedulers for DOCSIS and LTE by having them work together and hit the latency goal.

And there’s quite a chasm to overcome.

For the DOCSIS upstream, 5 milliseconds has been the “minimum latency,” though it’s typical to see it at 11 milliseconds, and grow to 30 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds if there is contention in the upstream, Chapman said.

The goal with the BWR proposal is to shrink that number down 2 milliseconds or lower.

Fundamentally, BWR enables the DOCSIS and LTE schedulers to talk to each other through a technique called “pipelining,” with BWR serving as a request into the DOCSIS system.

“It’s fundamentally an API into the DOCSIS scheduler” that allows an external component, like a small cell, to ask for a certain number of bytes at some future point in time, Chapman explained.

While this allows the LTE and DOCSIS scheduling systems to communicate, the BWR method essentially “hides” the DOCSIS latency beneath LTE and reduces the latency by taking advantage of the predictive nature of the LTE scheduler, he said.

For the trial, CableLabs and Cisco set up a physical LTE and DOCSIS test bed that includes a commercial LTE user device talking to an open source LTE small cell that was being backhauled on a commercial DOCSIS 3.1 modem and a Cisco cBR-8 CCAP/CMTS.

A small amount of code was inserted into the LTE MAC layer, which didn’t change the scheduler, but instead sent out a scheduling decision that is put into the form of a BWR message, Andreoli-Fang explained.

That message was then sent out on the DOCSIS uplink and received by an API on the cBR-8. A series of packets were then sent from the LTE user device to the CMTS, and the results showed that the method provided a clear latency advantage.

The results showed that “DOCSIS is well positioned as a viable backhaul technology for LTE,” Chapman claimed. “The path to success is actually having mobile and DOCSIS technologies working together as one."

The proof-of-concept is now moving to the next phase, as CableLabs has kicked off a committee that will explore the possible specification of the BWR protocol and have it become part of the DOCSIS scheduling system, Andreoli-Fang said.

“It’s something we can define at CableLabs,” Chapman said, adding that LTE will also have the ability to write to that API.

What’s not known is when BWR might become a more formal piece of the puzzle.

Fellow webinar panelist, Craig Cowden, SVP of wireless technology at Charter Communications, stressed that there’s time for that to develop, noting that the FCC is still working out rules for the use of CBRS and that the broader product ecosystem still needs to come together.

RELATED: Charter Puts Wireless Broadband to the Test (subscription required)

“There is some time, for us anyway, to see this evolve,” he said.

But the underlying work is “incredibly important as we talk about how we could be able to enable our DOCSIS HFC networks for true fixed mobile convergence, particularly as we talk about 4G, and especially 5G, where those lower latency requirements are essential,” Cowden said earlier in the webinar.

SCTE/ISBE, CableLabs and NCTA-The Internet & Television Association has set a March 30 deadline for paper proposals for the Fall Technical Forum at Cable-Tec Expo, which is set to run October 22-25 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

Selected tech papers will be presented during Cable-Tec Expo and will be published as part of the industry’s archival body of technical literature, the Fall Technical Forum Proceedings.

They said the Expo the Fall Technical Forum this year will target the following areas:

-Wireline Access Network

-Wireless Access Network

-Internet of Things

-Digitizing the Customer Experience

-Cloud & Virtualization

-Operational Transformation

-Business Services

-Video Services

-Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

-Security

The Expo 2018 Program Committee is chaired by Kevin Hart, EVP and chief product and technology officer for Cox Communications.

Last year’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver drew about 8,800 attendees.

Deepening its view into next-gen cable access architectures, CableLabs has recently launched a working group focused on Remote MAC/PHY, an emerging approach for next-gen distributed converged cable access platform (CCAP) architectures.

“The scope of the work for Remote MAC/PHY…is in its early stages,” Jon Schnoor, lead architect at CableLabs, explained in this brief video that accompanied a blog post about the work. “We’ve just kicked off the program, so the working group is actually defining the type of work we’re going to do.”

CableLabs noted that the new Remote MACPHY working group is part of its Distributed CCAP Architecture (DCA) program, and is comprised of operators, equipment manufacturers, and CableLabs’ engineers.

The resulting work aims to develop one or more specs that enable Remote MAC/PHY products from multiple vendors to interoperate.

The greater focus on Remote MAC/PHY at CableLabs also comes amid recent activity centered on Remote PHY.

RELATED: Test Time for Remote PHY

Both efforts are tied into approaches that take and break down components and functions of the network and place them further toward the edge of the HFC network. A central idea of distributed access architectures are to enable cable operators to reduce power and space requirements of more centralized products that took hold in the first wave of deployments for CCAP, a high-density architecture that combine the functions of the edge QAM and the cable modem terminations system.

RELATED: Ramping Up for Remote PHY  

Cable operators are also looking for distributed access architecture to improve the fidelity of the outside plant and to help them drive more capacity for DOCSIS 3.1 and to set things up for Full Duplex DOCSIS, an annex for D3.1 that will support multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds.

Operators are weighing options whereby they would distribute just the PHY or both the MAC and the PHY, as the latter approach distributes more of the smarts of the network but costs a bit more power to pull off. Vendors such as Nokia are trying to end the debate with distributed approaches that use “universal” cable access nodes that can be configured (via software) to run as a Remote PHY device or a Remote MAC/PHY device.

RELATED: Nokia Touts Versatility for ‘Virtualized’ Distributed Platform for Cable Ops

Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), an extension to DOCSIS 3.1 that will enable symmetric multi-gigabit speeds, took another step forward following the addition of MAC Layer support, CableLabs announced Tuesday.

MAC Layer support arrives more than three months after CableLabs released the physical layer specs for FDX.

RELATED: Full Duplex DOCSIS Plows Ahead

The addition is focused on the MAC management messaging and operation needed to enable FDX between the cable modem termination system and the cable modem, and includes new processes such as sounding, echo cancellation training, and resource block assignment, Karthik Sundaresan, a principal architect at CableLabs, explained in this blog post.

Notably, an FDX-capable CMTS will receive and transmit in the same spectrum, while FDX modems can either receive or transmit in the same FDX spectrum. The FDX band, Sundaresan explained, is divided into sub-bands that the CMTS assigns which sub-band or sub-bands each modem uses for upstream or downstream operation.

Among the FDX processes, sounding is a method used to identify groups of cable modems, called Interference Groups, that would interfere with each other if they were allowed to transmit and receive at the same time in a specific sub-band. Those Interference Groups are then grouped into smaller Transmission Groups.

“The new FDX capability and functions are introduced as changes across the MULPI (MAC and Upper Layer Protocols Interface) specification and is now an official part of the specification,” Sundaresan explained. 

As the new FDX specs mature, CableLabs expects it will start to see products with that capability emerge over the next year as silicon is developed and built into product designs. Meanwhile, CableLabs will host a series of FDX interoperability events, with the first one slated for Feb. 5-9 in Louisville, Colo.

“These will start from basic node level echo cancellation and gradually progress into full-blown product interoperability,” Sundaresan wrote.

CableLabs is also working on OSS changes needed for FDX and has started work on changes required to support FDX when deployed with new remote PHY architectures (FDX assumes the use of a distributed, node-plus-zero architecture).

RELATED: Cable-Tec Expo: Gearing Up for Remote PHY

Some industry experts expect to see FDX trials get underway sometime this year and into 2019, with 2020 viewed as the technology’s first significant deployment year.

CableLabs introduced the concept in February 2016. Per the specs, the FDX band will reside between 108 MHz and 684 MHz (regardless of whether FDX channels occupy the whole band), so it’s possible for existing D3.1 modems to also use some spectrum set aside for D3.1.

Tightening the cable industry’s ties to open source, CableLabs said it has booted up two projects linked to OpenStack, an operating system for the cloud.

-SNAPS-Boot will prepare servers for OpenStack, enabling operators to install Linux on their servers and prepare them for OpenStack installation with a single command.

-SNAPS-OpenStack installer aims to bring up OpenStack on running servers using a containerized version of the OpenStack software.

They also intend to drive product interoperability, Randy Levensalor, lead architect, wired technologies at CableLabs, explained in this blog post.

CableLabs, he added, developed the new software with Aricent.

Both link back to the overarching SNAPS program at CableLabs that will underpin virtualization projects and deployments that implement software-defined networking and network functions virtualization.

RELATED: Comcast Has OpenStack’s Back

Those projects are also entering view as operators and vendors start to get a fix on a new generation of virtualized Converged Cable Access Platform products that put key functions in software that run on off-the-shelf hardware and represent a pivot away from purpose-built hardware.  

CableLabs,  Levensalor explained, “spearheaded the SNAPS project to fill in gaps in the open source community to ease the adoption of SDN/NFV with our cable members” in part by encouraging interoperability for traditional and software-based services. Another aims is to seed a group of developers that will create a strong bond with the open source community, and to drive developers to the cable industry.

Looking ahead, the CableLabs exec noted that the R&D group has kicked off talks with the OPNFV Cross Community Continous Integraton (XCI) project to use SNAPS OpenStack as a platform for trying out test tools and virtual network functions. The goal is to conduct a pilot in early 2018.

Cable techies are looking around "the fog."

At a Silicon Valley conference early this month, computer and communications experts delved into the IoT and "the fog," a derivative of cloud computing. CableLabs is evaluating the fog's role, especially in emerging wireless services, and Comcast awarded an "Innovation Fund" grant recently to a Princeton University "Cloud to Fog" research project. 

"Fog is 'distributed cloud,'" according to Don Clarke, principal architect at CableLabs, who noted that the concept emerged a couple years ago as a Cisco marketing term. Other experts acknowledged that "fog" and "edge" are often used interchangeably, but they are synergistic – not synonymous.

In a seminal academic paper on "The Fog Computing Paradigm" three years ago, Ivan Stojmenovic and Sheng Wen of Deakin University in Australia described scenarios in which fog services "can be hosted at end devices such as set-top boxes or access points."

By the researchers' reckoning the fog lies between the cloud and the edge. Fog computing is envisioned for use in wireless services, including mobile voice, Internet of Things and connectivity for autonomous vehicles and other new networks.

"Fog can be distinguished from cloud by its proximity to end users ... and its support for mobility," Stojmenovic and Wen wrote. "As fog computing is implemented at the edge of the network, it provides low latency, location awareness and improves quality-of-services for streaming and real-time applications."

Major developments have been taking place quietly since the paper's publication. The 400 attendees at the Fog World Congress in Santa Clara, Calif., Oct. 31-Nov. 1 examined evolving trends in fog computing, including increasing deployments of fog as an early-stage technology and as a solution to Internet of Things latency.

For example, at a session titled "Fog Over Denver," Traci Hiltonberry, director of innovation for the Denver South Economic Development Partnership, explained the creation of a "national model for fog computing and networking in a smart city ... [for] transportation and mobility, public safety, resilience and resource conservation, smart buildings and public health."

Another speaker forecast that fog computing will become an $18.2 billion market by 2022. Christian Renaud, research director-IoT at 451 Research, predicted that fog's primary uses will be in the utilities and energy sectors, followed by transportation, healthcare and industrial. He said he foresees revenue models growing by 37% from 2018 to 2022.

Meanwhile: Fog Forming in the Cable Industry
The potential for this "fog" capability at the network edge is on the minds of several cable operators, although they declined to provide status reports or timetables for implementing the architecture.

"The edge is the new piece of the cloud puzzle," CableLab's Clarke told Multichannel News. He said that identifying "latency and bandwidth efficiency between the cloud and the end user" is a critical issue in edge development.

"It's about relationships," he said, noting that there are "very different dynamics" as various sectors in the network operations business explore "how standards and open-source can become symbiotic."

Clarke said the "edge is where the connectivity provides the latency you need for the service experience," citing issues such as "where does that service terminate and where does the content get delivered?" He eschewed the word "fog," focusing instead on edge computing.

"These days you can put a lot of functionality [into] base station and other less complex, lower power consumption" devices, he said.

"Wireless is an important consideration as we architect these new networks at 5G [fifth generation] and beyond," Clarke said.

Meanwhile, Comcast said that with its grant -- of an unspecified sum -- to the Princeton University project, the company sought to support research into the "cloud-to-fog interface in the areas of storage, communications and management."

In announcing the grant, Jason Livingood, VP-technology policy & standards at Comcast Cable, called fog networking "an architectural approach that seeks to make networks more efficient by pushing network intelligence and processing capabilities closer to end users." Livingood said that fog computing processes would enable the "cloud and edge [to] form a mutually beneficial, interdependent continuum" that would eliminate or minimize the need to determine if a specific task should be handled in the cloud or at a customer's edge device.

"This project highlights the challenges and solution approaches in building a unified interface framework between edge and cloud under the fog-networking paradigm," Livingood said. A Comcast spokesman told Multichannel News that there is no specific timetable for a report on the Princeton research; he characterized the fog exploration as "pretty new."

At Princeton, the project is being supervised by Dr. Mung Chiang, an electrical engineering professor, founder of the Princeton EDGE Lab and a co-founder of the global Open Fog Consortium. Among the supporters of Princeton's EDGE Lab are ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft.

Chiang has said he helped launch the consortium to address common problems with “edge networks” — the connections at the periphery of a more centralized network, close to the actual devices that use the network. In a Princeton profile of his work, Chiang said, “As we further develop the ‘Internet of Things’ — networked devices in smart cities or connected cars — we have a unique opportunity to bring the ‘cloud’ closer to the edge and users as ‘fog.’”

Photo by d3sign/Getty Images

A set of modems and gateways from Arris, Kaon Media and Technicolor passed the DOCSIS 3.1 test at CableLabs following certification wave 121.

Certification means those modems are interoperable with DOCSIS network gear, and is a requirement for retail distribution. Most cable operators also require DOCSIS certification on modems and gateways they distribute themselves.

This round, Arris got a passing grade for the Touchstone TG3452 a DOCSIS 3.1-powered gateway that supports high-speed internet and home telephony and has an integrated four-port gigabit router and dual-band 802.11n and 802.11ac Wave2 WiFi access point, plus a battery backup. It also bakes in MoCA 2.0 for high-speed networking over home coax lines.

Arris’s model also supports RDK-B, the broadband flavor of the Reference Design Kit, the preintegrated software stack for set-tops and gateways managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Charter Communications.

RELATED: RDK Rides the Adoption Wave

Arris hinted at the new model during its Q3 earnings call. Larry Robinson, president of Arris’s CPE division, noted that the company had started deployments on a new DOCSIS 3.1 voice modem with a key, but unnamed U.S. cable operator. Comcast, which has been aggressive with D3.1, is Arris’s largest customer.

Update: A reader inquired about which vendor is supplying the silicon in Arris's new model, pointing to recent complaints about the performance of DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem products with Intel Puma 6 made by suppliers that included Arris and Netgear that has since been dismissed. Arris declined to identify the chipmaker for the new TG3452, adding that it "works with a variety of partners" and that the company typically does not "disclose our technology providers or our plans or agreements with them." Arris also did not disclose the chipmaker for its first D3.1 model, a retail device called the SB8200, though it's believed to be powered by Broadcom silicon. However, this data sheet on the model in question, which notes the TG3452's use of a "Multi Processor Technology with ARM and ATOM based Application Processor," suggests that it is using Intel's new D3.1-powered Puma 7 chipset, the reader added.  

CableLabs also stamped the VM3000G telephony D3.1 gateway from Kaon Media, a supplier based in South Korea. That device also embeds dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, four gigabit Ethernet ports, two phone ports, and an option for MoCA 2.0.

CableLabs documents show that Technicolor won certification for a model called the CGA4131. As of Friday morning, the vendor had yet to respond to a request for more details about that model.

The latest round of D3.1 certifications arrive as several cable operators, including Comcast, RCN, Mediacom Communications, expand their deployment of the technology, which currently brings gigabit speeds to the downstream. Liberty Global and Charter Communications are among major MSOs that have D3.1 in their near-term plans.

Arris and Technicolor have also gained D3.1 certifications on other products, as have Hitron, Humax, Askey, CastleNet, Netgear, Sagemcom, Technicolor, and Ubee Interactive.