While the telecom industry has spent the past few decades touting the ever increasing bandwidth of their various broadband products, a panel of top cable experts said that consumers are increasingly looking to how those services perform as they continue to pile devices and applications onto their networks.

As cable has evolved from one-way video to two-way DOCSIS, users are becoming more concerned with how their different applications and services interact with their broadband network, Charter VP, connectivity technology Justin Colwell said on a panel session during Tuesday’s Opening General Session at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo moderated by Comcast senior technology adviser Tony Werner.

Also Read: Talent Gap Depends on What You're Doing, Cable Chiefs Tell Expo 

“We’re getting to the point, actually, where we’re going to have excess capacity, and customers’ applications are going to care less about the peak bandwidth, which will be important at times, but actually more about how latency and jitter and then the home network performs,” Colwell said. “A lot of what we’re focused on from a development perspective is how we create a better in-home or in-small business network, how we then use that end-to-end network to include where hosts are out on the internet in order to establish for applications that need it or customers that need it, the right experience.”

Home networks are getting more sophisticated as they increasingly have to handle more and more devices per home. Charter averages about 15 devices connected to its Wi-Fi network per customer, Colwell said. 

“The network has never been more complicated,” Colwell said. “And our jobs are to turn that around and make it very easy for customers. Things should just work.”

Werner asked if that transformation has made the home Local Area Network (LAN) more important.

“If you don’t have a good home LAN, it’s like putting bicycle tires on the back of a dragster,” Colwell said. 

No conversation about the internet can bypass the Metaverse, the amalgamation of the various technologies and applications possible as data speeds and capacities rise exponentially. While Facebook even changed its name to Meta in deference to the expected impact of the technology, it hasn’t materialized quite as quickly as some might have expected. Werner asked if the panel thought the Metaverse was hype or reality, and Cox Communications chief technology officer Len Barlik came down hard on the latter. 

“It is going to be a reality,” Barlik said. “I think the capabilities that we’re helping developers come forward with, and the expectations of customers, we’ll continue to see an evolution associated with it. We’re living in it today. … We’ll start to see a lot more.”

Also: Comcast Successfully Tests ‘Final’ Piece of ‘10G’ FDX DOCSIS 4.0 Network

Werner also asked about the future of video for the cable business. While traditional pay TV has lost millions of subscribers over the past decade and streaming video services have started to dominate, there have been some who have questioned if video service should even be part of the equation for cable operators.

Liberty Global EVP and CTO Enrique Rodriguez said that video will continue to remain an important part of Liberty Global’s product offerings, adding that it too will evolve like the rest of the business.

“We don’t see a future in which we stop innovating in video,” Rodriguez said, adding that although technology and needs have changed over the years — consumers are mostly concerned with the ability to onboard apps and integrating services — he still sees it having a place in the product mix. 

“Video, at least in our markets, will continue to be extremely important for a long, long time,” he said. ■

Today’s home WiFi network has become a true point of contention with residential customers. As device usage increases, so too does network strain and customer frustration. This means more support calls, truck rolls and even subscriber churn.

Significant increases in simultaneous streaming, work from home, virtual classrooms and video conferencing have exacerbated the demand on the network. As families shelter at home, device usage has skyrocketed, adding to the barrage of heavy traffic and unprecedented pressure on our home internet gateways.

In fact, we’ve seen device usage at home more than double during the workday in the United States since Jan. 29.

But this also presents an opportunity — a new way for service providers to differentiate their offerings and better serve subscribers. The bottom line is consumers’ homes, habits and connected devices are evolving, and so should the way we measure and manage our internet performance.

For years, internet service providers have looked at quality of service (QoS) to assess a home’s network and troubleshoot issues. While this is a great way of measuring the “pipe” — things like throughput, latency and jitter — in today’s increasingly complex connected home, QoS ends up answering the wrong question altogether. Whether a device works well depends not only on what the network provides, but also on the needs of the device, and application, at hand. If we’re only looking at raw performance of the broadband connection, we’re missing half the picture and will end up with a poor connection, and worse, unhappy subscribers.

Instead, service providers today must focus on what keeps consumers happy — the performance or, put another way, the experience of their devices.

Delivering on this promise requires getting closer to the customer experience, looking at the “happiness” of every device, and critically, fully understanding the device a consumer is using right now. After all, it’s not the internet that consumers really care about — it’s the quality of experience (QoE) when using their connected devices.

QoE is an entirely new approach to measuring internet performance that goes beyond QoS to address the modern challenges home networks face today. While QoS is all about broadband performance, a QoE mentality treats each device individually to deliver an optimal experience whatever the device or the application.

What exactly does this mean? To better understand what’s really happening inside our connected homes, we must consider:

1.) The entire set of paths from the internet to the devices in the home, particularly paths that include one or more hops of Wi-Fi. Most devices today are connected via Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi is often the biggest problem area on the path.

2.) A broader range of network performance factors such as data rates, signal strengths, packet error rates, interference, channel utilization, broadband throughput and the topology of the network in question.

3.) The needs of each device in the home, such as the type of device, networking capabilities, current and historical data usage and any other requirements in its specific environment.

Of course, there have been many attempts to remedy connection issues in other ways, but these have always come up short. Bigger, more powerful access points, for example, still can’t transmit enough to connect and power all the devices throughout a home. And adding multiple access points provides a static connection with no flexibility. Both these solutions simply “boost” signal, but they don’t adapt to rapidly changing network conditions.

This is where a QoE methodology truly shines. Equipped with an understanding of what’s actually happening throughout a home network, service providers can not only improve the offerings and customer satisfaction but also reduce costs while increasing ROI. These new and deep insights can be leveraged to better guide network configuration, establish whether Wi-Fi extenders are needed and can even enable support personnel to identify and resolve connection issues before a subscriber is aware of a problem. Equally important, these insights enable home networks to adapt to the needs of devices as they arise.

Let’s look at my home as an example. I have a WiFi-connected thermostat that can only achieve 5 megabits per second of throughput, as well as a video streaming device that can achieve 15 Mbps. Traditional measurements like QoS would lead us to believe the thermostat has poor performance, but the video streaming device is great. In reality, this is entirely backward — the thermostat is actually happy with even just 1 Mbps throughput, while the video streaming device would struggle to do 4K video reliably. Not only would the QoS method fail to highlight the problem with the video streaming device, but it might also put unnecessary attention and expense towards the thermostat.

By considering the needs of each individual device, QoE gives the more informed answer: the thermostat is fine, but the video device requires attention. Armed with this newfound insight, it’s possible to adjust the network and address the issue, even before I start streaming.

Don’t just take my word for it — this methodology has already proven successful. Despite load and congestion peaking at 69% and 80% above pre-COVID-19 baselines, ISPs that have adopted modern QoE metrics have maintained download and upload data speeds into and out of homes. In fact, disruption, load, congestion and optimization surges have increased by a combined 252%, yet many ISPs have managed to maintain network speeds within a 7% variation while ensuring device experience is preserved with the use of QoE.

The connected smart home is far more complex than it used to be, and the airwaves are only getting busier. But staying current and addressing new challenges doesn’t need to be difficult. It’s time we ditch outdated methods of measuring performance and adopt a modern approach that looks more deeply at a home’s connected digital health to ensure each and every device is happy. After all, happy devices equate to happy customers, and customer satisfaction is what drives new subscriptions, deepens penetration and prevents churn.

Bill McFarland is chief technology officer of Plume, a Palo Alto, California-based provider of whole-home WiFi products and services. 

MaxLinear Inc. last week put up $21 million in cash for Marvell’s G.hn business, a deal that gives the chipmaker a foray into home networking technology that, it says, will complement its Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) business.

MaxLinear, which got into the MoCA market in the spring of 2015 via its acquisition of Entropic Communications, says it expects to close the deal for Marvell’s G.hn business sometime in Q2 2017.

RELATED: MaxLinear Wraps Up Entropic Deal

G.hn, based on standards developed by the International Telecommunications Union, runs on a variety of home wiring, including coax, phone lines, powerlines and plastic optical fiber. HomeGrid Forum, which is tied to G.hn, includes promoter members such as AT&T, BT, KT Telecom and Chunghwa Teleco. Of recent note, Arris is using G.hn for a new line of “RipCurrent” routers and extenders sold at retail that use powerline technology in tandem with WiFi.

“G.hn is truly complementary to MoCA,” MaxLinear CEO Kishore Seendripu said on the company’s Q4 call last Wednesday (Feb. 8). While MoCA is adept at high-speeds networking on home coax lines, he said G.hn is “ideally suited” for electrical twisted pair and powerline networks.

The pending acquisition,  he added, will also enable MaxLinear to secure “several strategic tier 1 telco operator engagements and design wins,” including those with South Korea’s KT Telecom, China Telecom, and Reliance in India, among others.  

MaxLinear CTO Adam Spice said the G.hn business being acquired has “nascent revenues” in the “low single-digital millions of dollars’ in the Q1/Q2 2017 timeframe,” but gives MaxLinear “a strong pipeline of design wins and platforms that are already ramping.”

As for the complementary nature of the technologies, Seendripu said telecom operators that “subscribe to the ITU standards do not use MoCA for the distribution inside the home.”

He added that “MoCA is far superior to G.hn,” but said G.hn “wave two technology” from Marvell enables on twisted pair “gigabit- plus data rates that otherwise was not possible in the past.”

That, he said, will allow MaxLinear to sell the G.hn product to telcos that are deploying xDSL, G.fast or fiber largely outside North America.

On the MoCA front, Seendripu said the company’s next-gen MoCA 2.5 platform, which can reach up to 3  Gbps, is on track to ramp in the second half of 2017. MaxLinear’s MoCA technology is also “morphed” in to its c.LINK platform, which provides low-cost access infrastructure for MDUs and is already being deployed by several cable MSOs in China.

Regarding  DOCSIS 3.1, he expects that part of MaxLinear’s business to become a “very meaningful growth driver in second half of 2017.” D3.1 product growth rose by more than two times in Q4, but remains “a small part of our cable data mix,” Seendripu said.

Also in the second half of this year, MaxLinear expects to start sampling silicon for Full Duplex DOCSIS, an extension of DOCSIS 3.1 that supports symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps.

RELATED: ‘Full Duplex’ DOCSIS Speeds Ahead

MaxLinear posted Q4 revenues of $87.1 million, down 12% from the year-ago quarter, and net income of $8.3 million (12 cents per share). For Q1 2017, the company expects revenues of $86 million to $90 million.

Arris expanded its retail strategy with last week’s debut of a new line of ‘SURFboard’-branded routers and extenders that aim to deliver whole-home coverage with equipment that pairs WiFi with a high-speed backbone that relies on a home’s powerlines.

Arris’s powerline-based platform uses G.hn (branded by the vendor under the “RipCurrent” moniker), a home networking platform that competes with HomePlug and, to an extent, the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), which uses a home’s coaxial lines.

Arris also offers a range of whole-home networking products that use MoCA, though most of those are focused on platforms that are being delivered and managed by cable operators and other MVPDs.

Arris also looked at MoCA for its new retail router line, but found that there are more complexities around that technology with respect to in-home wiring, Tom Boshell, director of global retail sales at Arris, said.

Using a combo of G.hn, powerline and WiFi, he said, offers a way to deliver ubiquitous coverage in the home with a retail product that offers a relatively easy self-install option, he added. Arris believes the router/extender set up will eliminate dead zones in homes as video streaming and other bandwidth-intensive apps on home networks on a broader range of devices become increasingly prevalent.

Arris started to make its new line available for pre-order via the Arris Store and at Amazon.com. According to the Arris Store, the expected ship date is April 29.

Here’s the new product lineup:

WiFi Routers with RipCurrent:

-Arris SURFboard SBR-AC1200P (802.11ac, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and four internal antennas): $119.99

-Arris SURFboard SBR-AC1900P (802.11ac, four GigE ports, six internal antennas): $199.99

-Arris SURFboard SBR-AC3200P (“tri-band concurrent” 802.11ac, four GigE ports, six internal antennas: $299.99

RipCurrent-enabled extenders:

-Arris SURFboard SBX1000P:  $59.99

-Arris SURFboard SBX1200P (dual-band concurrent): $99.99

Arris has also developed iOS and Android apps to assist with installation and management of the user’s home network.

The product introduction expands Arris’s retail efforts under its own SURFboard brand. For a time, Arris had offered retail products under both its brand and the Motorola brand following its acquisition of Motorola home in April 2013. Zoom Telephonics  inked a deal last year to use the Motorola brand in cable modems, routers and set-tops sold at retail, and launched its initial Moto-branded product lineup in February 2016.

Here’s a promotional video about Arris’s new G.hn-based retail router product family:

Sky, the U.K.-based video and Internet service, Sky shed a few more technical details about Sky Q, its next-gen whole-home, multiscreen video platform, announcing that it will use AirTies Wireless Networks’ Mesh technology to enable and manage WiFi on all Sky Q devices.

Sky Q, slated to launch in the early part of the year, will feature an array of connected devices, including the Sky Q Silver and Sky Q – primary boxes for the home’s main TV that’s packed with 12 tuners and 2 terabytes of storage; the Sky Q mini (a WiFi-connected box for viewing on secondary TVs), and the Sky Q Hub, a gateway-style device that will use Powerline- and WiFi-based technology to communicate with Sky Q boxes.  The provider has also developed the Sky Q app for tablets, with plans to extend support to smartphones later this year.

Sky’s new platform will use AirTies’s Mesh system to deliver linear, over-the-top and stored local content to Sky Q-compatible devices that are hanging off the home network. Last month, Cisco Systems announced that it will provide security for Sky Q, including its Cisco VideoGuard Everywhere, as well as its headend platform for service delivery, and its set-top middleware.

Supporting a hybrid system with both wired (via powerline) and wireless (via WiFi) was important to Sky for it to address the challenges posed by the varying types of building materials that are used in subscriber homes.

“We've got a somewhat challenging situation from an architecture standpoint,” Andrew Olson, director of new products at Sky, said, noting that WiFi can have trouble penetrating thousand-year-old stone walls and cinderblocks.  “Using different technologies… allows us to create this great network and extend the WiFi coverage for all of those standard devices throughout the home to make the network stronger, which we think is really important for customers." 

And it fits well with “Fluid Viewing,” the term Sky is using to describe its whole-home video experience. In addition to supporting live and VOD across screens, Sky Q will also allow subs to download some VOD assets as well as shows recorded to the DVR.

“Once people start to get a taste of being able to get the same content flowing across these different screens, it becomes a really powerful story,” said Olson, who joined Sky in February 2012, and previously served as COO at Comcast within its Converged Products Group, which played a key role in the development of X1, that MSO’s next-gen video platform. He joined Comcast via its 2006 acquisition of multiscreen publishing firm thePlatform.

While a device with 12 tuners might seem like overkill, Sky believes that number fits well with consumer viewing trends as more and more content becomes available to them.

In an example scenario, Sky Q will enable viewing on the main TV and to two Sky Q Mini boxes, and streaming to two tablets – at the same time – while providing enough tuning overhead to record four additional programs.

“It’s a huge step forward,” Olson said. “It's a bit of a golden age in content…there are more things people want to record than ever before." 

Blending TV with OTT

Sky Q will also open the door to OTT content. But rather than tacking that content on as separate apps, Sky will integrate those partners with the Sky Q experience. Announced content partners for that initiative include YouTube, Vevo, Barcroft TV, Electus, and Funny Or Die, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, GoPro, Jukin Media, Kin Community, Red Bull Media House and Whistle Sports.

And what about Netflix, which has been integrated with Virgin Media’s TiVo-powered platform?

“We’re definitely talking to a lot of different partners,” Olson said. “We’re definitely open to working with other people, but we are strongly prioritizing brining the content natively into the experience.”

As for that experience, Sky Q will add a voice-based navigation capability later this year, and is enabling its platform to stream in audio by integrating it with Apple AirPlay.

On tap: Ultra HD

Looking further ahead, Sky Q will also support Ultra HD content, including on-demand movie titles and some live sports, later this year. But rather than streaming that content, Sky Q will rely on progressive downloads in an attempt to unify how that content is delivered via speedy fiber-based connections as well as slower DSL links.

Sky plans to deliver 4K fare using the new bandwidth-efficient HEVC codec. Early on, Sky Q won’t offer any YouTube content in 4K because that implementation requires VP9, which currently isn’t supported by the Sky Q hardware.

On Monday, AirTies also announced a hybrid mesh software platform for in-home networking that supports the management of WiFi connections as well as several wired-based technologies, including powerline, Multimedia over Coax Alliance, and Ethernet.

“Hybrid Mesh enables the next-generation of video distribution in the home” said Bulent Celebi executive chairman and co-founder of AirTies, in a statement. “Today we consume HD video - soon to become ultra HD - on mobile devices in addition to multiple TVs.” 

Offering a clear indication that adoption of MoCA 2.0 is accelerating, all new product certifications during the first quarter of 2015 were for devices that integrated the speedy coax-based home networking platform, according to the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance.

MoCA technology is being used in a variety of whole-home DVRs, set-tops, broadband gateways, and Ethernet-to-coax bridge devices. As an upgrade of MoCA 1.1, the 2.0 version is designed to support usable throughputs of more than 400 Mbps in “Basic” mode and 500 Mbps in a “Turbo” point-to-point setting when connected devices are operating in the baseline mode and utilizing a single channel. MoCA 2.0 also supports an “Enhanced” mode that uses channel bonding to produce throughputs of between 800 Mbps to 1 Gbps. In January, MoCA said preliminary 2.0 field trial results showed that the technology achieved net throughputs of 400 Mbps or more in 90% of coax “paths,” and greater than 350 Mbps in 95% of paths.

Of the 35 device certifications since the launch of the MoCA 2.0 certification program in Q1 2014, 28 have been for products integrating MoCA 2.0, and nine integrating MoCA 1.1, the Alliance said, noting that Comcast and Verizon were among the service providers that announced MoCA 2.0-capable gateways last year.

Arris, Alcatel-Lucent, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Entropic Communications, Hitron, Netgear, Pace, Samsung, Technicolor, Ubee Interactive, and WNC are among the companies that have received MoCA 2.0 certifications for various products.

“This has been a prolific year for certification of devices incorporating MoCA 2.0,” said Dr. Stephen Palm, chair of the MoCA Certification Board and senior technical director at Broadcom, a maker of MoCA silicon.  “MoCA Certification and the interoperability it represents are cornerstones for continued successful adoption of any connectivity technology standard, especially when used by service providers.”

“MoCA 2.0 certifications have surpassed our expectations just one year after the launch of the certification program,” added Charlie Cerino, president of MoCA. “The number of certified MoCA 2.0 devices is a clear trend on how quickly it is being adopted by the industry.”