ATLANTA - Telecommunications tech vendor CommScope is conducting acquisition talks with cable tech company Arris, Reuters reports.

Both companies have presence at the just-about-to-end SCTE Cable-Tec Expo Show, positioned not too far from Arris’ Suwanee, Ga. headquarters. Neither is commenting at this point.

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As Reuters noted, Arris shares spiked 13% on Wednesday, with rumor of the deal talks hitting Wall Street.

"We see some industrial logic to the deal, but we are not prepared to believe it,” wrote Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold, who published a note on the reported deal talks. "We see very little overlap for cost synergies beyond G&A. The companies are quite different, with Arris focused on electronics and CommScope on apparatus."

ATLANTA - Sketching out the broad strokes of what it will take for the wireless industry to accomplish the very dense goal of widely deploying 5G services, a duo of consultants told an SCTE Cable-Tec Expo audience that cable operators have the power.

Literally.

It turns out that their hybrid fiber coaxial networks are pretty well situated to provide the electrical power needed to juice the thousands of small cell connections that make up a 5G service.

“Coax is a very efficient way to distribute power out to these small cells,” said Erik Gronvall, VP of strategy and business development for CommScope.

“The amount of coverage, and the amount of radios required to get that coverage they need is way beyond the revenue” that [wireless] can generate from 5G, said Todd Loeffelholz, VP of product management for Alpha Technologies. “The MSOs have what they need, and it’s becoming obvious.”

Indeed, as the wireless operators embark on deployment of a technology that will require the wireline services of cable operators, the latter constituency is looking to cash in on a brand new revenue stream.

The consultants noted Sprint’s recent MVNO deal with Altice USA. While Alice is able to lease the wireless network it needs to launch a mobile service next year, Sprint is getting the backhaul and network densification from Altice required to enable its pending 5G launch.

As Gronvall explained, 5G will require a fundamental realignment of wireless networks, not too different from the movement of the “PHY” layer currently occurring in hybrid fiber coaxial networks of cable operators as they move to Distributed Access Architectures.

While traditional wireless network designs were “macro cell focused,” with “everything coming off huge towers,” 5G will require a far denser network design.

The dense arrangement of radio-enabled “small cells” that define 5G will require three main things from cable operators: electrical power; backhaul, which is the network data connection to these small cells; and a small cell installation that is acceptable to local stakeholders.

In regard to the first requirement—power—cable operators must make sure that electrical requirements of small cell devices being paired to their network matches up, said Loeffelholz, noting that the typical HFC network wasn’t built to power small cells.

“We’re going to see the rollout of HFC ready small cells in next 12-24 months, but right now there’s not a lot fo HFC-ready product,” Loeffelholz added. “For cable operators, understanding what type of voltage you have and what you need to deploy is very important.”

As for backhaul, Gronvall said that’s the area of the typical wireless 5G architecture that’s most compatible with an HFC network. 

ATLANTA - Setting the table for a Cable-Tec Expo panel discussion on the state of the cable industry’s Reference Design Kit (RDK) open source software initiate five years after launch, moderator Leslie Ellis noted a few fast facts about the year 2013.

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The term “selfie” hit the Zeitgeist that year. Edward Snowden disclosed secret CIA documents. Oh, and …

It was at that point that former Comcast executive Steve Heeb, president and general manager of RDK Management, and the man who has overseen the joint initiative since it was kicked off by Comcast, Liberty Global and the erstwhile Time Warner Cable, put his own thoughts into Ellis’ exercise in in time perspective.

“Five years ago, if you said you were going to put an application layer on top of broadband, they would have told you to leave the room,” Heeb said.

Indeed, the open source development paradigm wasn’t popular—or even accepted—in the cable industry when the RDK initiative was originally conceived. But at the time, operators needed to try something to get more nimble as more agile over-the-top ecosystems began purging their subscriber ranks.

By having one centralized repository of software code, operators and their key vendor partners quickly realized significant software development time savings for video set-tops. They could create one user interface that would work across numerous set-tops from multiple vendors. The time it took for system on a chip (SoC) integration got cut in half. In short, re-invention of the wheel stopped occurring in the cable industry, at least for the video piece.

Today, Heeb said, more than 350 companies use RDK—not just the operators represented on Wednesday’s panel, which included Comcast, Liberty and Cox, but major hardware vendors including Intel, Broadcom, Technicolor and Humax, just to name a few.

Heeb said that there are more than 4 million transactions a month at RDK’s central repository for RDK code.

Related: RDK Partners With Metrological for Easier OTT App Integration

The software stack is standard on all video set-top boxes deployed by Comcast, Liberty, Cox and other cable companies around the world. And RDK recently extended its video capabilities, working with European software company Metrological to design an open source means for operators to integrate popular OTT services like Netflix into their user interfaces.

“Roku has Netflix and Hulu, and so do we,” said Bill Warga, VP of technology for Liberty Global.

The ‘B’ is for broadband

For his part, Warga never had doubts RDK would catch on. “I did think that open source would take off in cable—we needed a solution like this.” He noted RDK’s use in the development of Liberty’s voice remote. With Comcast already having laid down so much of the open source road work in development of its own X1 Voice Remote, Liberty was able to instead concentrate on other challenges—such as figuring out multiple Swedish dialects—and as a result, it vastly reduced the time to market for the voice control feature.

But Warga admitted that he never foresaw RDK’s current trajectory, which is moving into broadband services.

Sketching out the new domain of RDK, Heeb said the standard is now a “whole-home open source software platform for video and broadband devices. It goes across all devices an operator has in a home—from QAM set-tops to gateways to mesh extenders and even cameras.”

Earlier this month, Istanbul-based technology vendor AirTies said it will debut a version of its mesh WiFi software for broadband devices running RDK, beginning in the first quarter of next year.

And earlier this week, German smart home technology vendor Plume announced that it has open sourced its previously proprietary middleware, which is available to operators across residential gateways, modems, routers, access points, extenders, set-top boxes, IoT hubs, smart speakers and other devices. Plume said its open-source framework, which it calls OpenSync, is compatible with, and leverages, RDK.

Ed Shrum, VP of product development and management of devices and networking for Cox, said RDK will soon be deployed in every piece of residential CPE.

One of RDK’s biggest selling points, according to Heeb, is its ability to offer operators control of device data. Cox, Shrum explained, recently took advantage of that capability on its RDK-enabled gateways to diagnose an SSID issue. “We had the data needed solve the problem at our finger tips,” he said. Prior to RDK, Shrum added, Cox would have had to get the gateway vendor to write and push out a special piece of engineering code.

Certainly, as Wednesday’s morning panel showed, RDK’s coalition is a pretty happy one, with Comcast senior VP of devices and advanced systems declaring that his team uses RDK “every day, day and night” to create a better customer experience.

But there is at least a little discord. There’s disagreement, for example, on how much integration of FAANG companies to allow. Heeb conceded to MCN that he’s been reassuring RDK’s operator stakeholders at SCTE that bringing in popular devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home Assistant into the ecosystem will be accretive, and not a threat.

After all, he noted, there was a time, when companies like Comcast and Liberty wouldn’t think of integrating Netflix into their video systems.

Of course, that was so five years ago. 

ATLANTA -- Those weary of the wireless industry’s hype around 5G found a welcome opening general session at the SCTE’s annual Cable-Tec Expo show Tuesday.

The hits started with Cox Communications technology chief Kevin Hart, delivering a mild tongue-in-cheek remark during his general session intro: “You know 5G is going to be great, because it’s got 25% more G,” Hart quipped.

NCTA president and CEO Michael Powell, appearing in the session’s keynote panel, was a little more blunt: “You know what the wireless guys like most? Wireline networks,” he said, remarking on 5G’s need for backhaul and other services typically provided by HFC network operators.

Powell also said, “5G is 25% technology, 75% marketing,” dismissing the technology to little more than the wireless industry’s “latest widget.”

Appearing in the general session panel alongside Powell, CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney compared 5G to Teligent, the late-‘90s-era fixed wireless company he formerly served as CIO for before joining HP. He recalled the challenges of trying to establish point-to-point communications technologies in big cities and around phenomena including trees and fog.

“I think 5G is going to have similar issues,” McKinney said.

The cable industry org chiefs made these remarks as wireless industry companies, including Verizon, market 5G fixed wireless services as replacements for cable broadband.

Masters of cable

The featuring of Powell and McKinney, along with Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers President and CEO Mark Dzuban, on Tuesday’s opening panel session was symbolic of the SCTE’s new center-of-gravity juxtaposition in an industry trade-show universe that no longer includes the erstwhile Cable Show.

According to Dzuban, collaboration between the trio’s respective organizations is more robust than ever. “We have a good relationship spanning ideation and deployment,” he said, describing the synergy between CableLabs’ R&D capabilities, SCTE’s real-world application acumen and the NCTA’s policy-making chops.

“You could do a Venn diagram on how we overlap,” added the session's moderator, Comcast technology chief Tony Werner. “And when we get it right, it’s very powerful.”

For his part, Powell used the well-attended morning session at the Georgia World Congress to hammer home lobbying points: the cable industry doesn’t get enough credit from a policy-making perspective. Oh, and California is way out on a limb in terms of net neutrality legislation.

From a national policy-making perspective, Powell said he’s concerned that the cable industry is getting “left behind in the nation’s optimistic narrative of the future,” the fixation overly applied to tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple.

“No other industry has been as reliably consistent in doing what it says it’s going to do, deploying what it says it’s going to deploy, as this one,” Powell said, drawing applause.

Powell wondered aloud if the cable industry is perhaps too humble in not more loudly tub thumping its own innovations, like the emerging Full Duplex DOCSIS standard that will ultimately deliver 10 Gbps symmetrical broadband.

Perhaps offering cable engineers with marketing responsibilities an idea, Powell referred to this new tech as the cable industry’s “10G” standard.

He also described the NCTA as “at war” with California over its recently enacted state net neutrality legislation.

Tuesday’s session was closed by Cox president Pat Esser, who said his privately owned cable company will spend $10 billion over the next five years on network infrastructure investments. 

As an engineer who has been involved with Cable-Tec Expo for decades, SCTE•ISBE president and CEO Mark Dzuban has seen the show’s “bucket list” expand quite a bit.

No, not the kind of bucket list you put together of things to do before you die. Far from dying, people close to the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers say the 49th edition of the SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo could set attendance marks.

Dzuban is talking about the sheer number of technological categories covered at the conference. Three decades ago, the cable industry could put the technologies it wanted to collaborate on at Expo into three main buckets: satellite video services, RF distribution and technology involved in acquiring video.

At this year’s event, the flora and fauna has expanded to wireline access networks, wireless access technologies, internet of things, digitizing the customer experience, virtualization and cloud, operational transformation, video services and security, just to name a few of the categories.

“You don’t see a lot of general practitioners anymore,” Dzuban said. “There are a lot more ear, nose and throat and heart guys. Everything has been broken up into piece parts. I get asked a lot, ‘What’s the hot topic at this year’s show?’ And I’ll say, ‘Based on which component of the body you’re talking about?’ ”

So which are the hottest technology trends this year, in terms of cable engineer interest?

“The work we’re doing on Full Duplex DOCSIS, which will enable 10-Gig symmetrical speeds in the near future is hugely important,” said Cox Communications chief product and technology officer Kevin Hart, this year’s Expo chair.

Hart said his high-interest list also includes the backhaul deployment work operators like Atlanta-based Cox are doing to support 5G wireless.

He also said network virtualization is hugely important. And he said security is “more important than ever before.”

Back in Atlanta, traditionally a cable-tech vendor hub, for the first time in five years, Dzuban and the rest of the SCTE brass are pretty confident of a strong year, attendance-wise. He’s hesitant to too go too far out on a limb on that, however, choosing to count the actual registrants when they show up.

Hart, however, has fewer reservations, predicting “record attendance” of around 10,000 attendees at Cable-Tec Expo.

Certainly, with the exit of the NCTA’s erstwhile The Cable Show two years ago, Expo has become the cable industry’s designated meeting place. As validated by the Cable TV Pioneers which, for the second straight year, is hosting its annual awards banquet in the Expo’s host city after long being synced up with the Cable Show.

The Expo’s premier status will be evident today, when Dzuban takes the main stage at the Georgia World Congress Center alongside CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney and NCTA president and CEO Michael Powell. It’s the first time those three organizational leaders will be teamed together on stage, organizers said.

“This will be a great showpiece of how our industry works together,” Dzuban said.

Dzuban said the show now represents all facets of a hugely valued community, with CableLabs focused on forward-looking technologies, SCTE•ISBE fixated on real-time implementation, and the NCTA and ACA representing key policy-making concerns.

All the buckets are covered.