Latest from Next TV in Small-cells

Casa Revenues Rise 18% in Q4

Jeff Baumgartner — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 23:15:00 +0000

After going public late last year, Casa Systems, a maker of cable and wireless network gear and software, said Q4 2017 revenues rose 18.9%, to $118 million, driven largely by software-based capacity expansions by cable operators.

That was paired with GAAP net income of $28.9 million, down 27.6% versus the year-ago quarter.

For the full year, revenues rose 11.2%, to $351.6 million.

Though new wireless opportunities are starting to kick in, cable’s move to DOCSIS 3.1 to deliver gigabit-class speeds remains a key growth driver at Casa, company president and CEO Jerry Guo said Tuesday on the earnings call.

And while some operators, such as Comcast and WideOpenWest and Mediacom Communications, have moved aggressively with D3.1, Casa expects deployments to ramp up this year and into 2019.

Cable is generally at the “initial stage” of D3.1, Guo said, adding that there’s “a lot more to come.”

Though integrated Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) products have plenty of legs left, he also sees cable’s ramp toward distributed access architectures ramping up in 2019 and beyond.

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Casa also talked up its ongoing move into wireless – including a focus on 4G, small cells and cellular IoT cores -- recalling recently announced wins with Telefonica (for its 4G Apex Small Cells and small cell management platform); and with China Mobile and Sprint, which are both using Casa’s Axyom Small Cell Core product.

Casa said it expects revenues for fiscal year 2018 to be in the range of $380 million to $395 million, with non-GAAP net income of between $100 million to $111 million.

Some of Casa other known customers include Charter Communications (coming way primarily from Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable), Rogers Communications and Mediacom Communications in North America; Televisa/IZZI Mexico and Megacable Mexico; Claro Telmex Columbia; Liberty Global, Vodafone and DNA Oyj; and Jupiter Communications and Beijing Gehua CATV Networks in the Asia Pacific region.

Update: Via Twitter, Jeff Heynen, consulting director at SNL Kagan, noted that Casa’s turning in of a solid Q4 wasn’t a surprise, but wondered if Casa could maintain consistency throughout the year:

Casa has historically had strong Q4s. The big question is whether the revenue troughs in subsequent quarters can be minimized. https://t.co/QyEjkbBGGs

— Jeff Heynen (@jeffheynen) March 7, 2018

Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold maintained his “Outperform” rating on Casa following its Q4 results, noting that the numbers exceeded expectations (sales of $118 million beat Wall Street consensus of $101.4 million), and Casa's 2018 forecast was a bit better than consensus.

“We expected seasonal strength in the software portion of Casa's business, which largely stems from capacity additions, but the results were well ahead of expectations at $50 million vs. our $38 million estimate,” he wrote, adding that the favorable mix fueled the gross margin to 77.1%, above his expectation of 69.9% and the Street's expectation of 68.5%.

Small Cells to Play Big Role in Charter’s Mobile Future

Jeff Baumgartner — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 18:29:00 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.

CableLabs-Cisco Trial Successfully Extends Bridge Between DOCSIS and LTE

Jeff Baumgartner — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 17:24:00 +0000

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.

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.

“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.

Sprint, Cox Make Peace, Cut Deal

Jeff Baumgartner — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 20:57:00 +0000

Burying the hatchet on a patent spat between the companies, Sprint and Cox Communications inked a new multi-year business agreement centered on the densification of Sprint’s wireless network.

Under the deal, part of a settlement that ends the aforementioned patent suits, paves the way for Sprint to use Cox’s broadband infrastructure for to accelerate the densification of Sprint’s wireless network while also beefing up the efficiency of its macro backhaul and small cell deployment.

Sprint noted that the new deal with Cox “will significantly accelerate deployment” throughout Cox's national footprint.

The agreement will also “increase and strengthen other business ties between the two companies,” the companies added, but didn’t elaborate on what that provision might specifically entail or if it might include an option for Cox to pursue an MVNO agreement with Sprint.

Cox would only add that the new agreement is “related to patent suit settlement and involves us providing additional services to Sprint that we offer today (wireless backhaul, small cell, etc.). They (and other carriers) will continue to be one of our largest customers.”

Unlike Comcast and Charter Communications, Cox did not push forward with an MVNO agreement with Verizon Communications that stemmed from the sale of Advanced Wireless Services spectrum to the mobile carrier. Cox previously built and deployed its own mobile service, but pulled the plug on that effort in late November 2011. Sprint and Altice USA announced the formation of a “full” MVNO deal last November.

“This is another opportunity to work with a strategic partner to accelerate our densification plans to improve our network performance and experience for Sprint customers throughout Cox's national territory," Sprint CTO John Saw said, in a statement. “Moving forward, we will continue to look for new opportunities to work with Cox in ways that are mutually beneficial."

"We are pleased to continue our positive, long-term working relationship that benefits both companies and consumers," added Steve Rowley, executive vice president, Cox Business.

The deal ends a court battle between Cox and Sprint. Last March, Cox asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to a decision that the MSO’s VoIP service infringed on certain Sprint patents.

Sprint and Comcast settled a separate patent last fall. Time Warner Cable (now part of Charter Communications) lost its case with Sprint in a judgement handed down last year. Sprint’s suit against Cable One was dismissed by the court in November 2016, according to court documents.

In December, Sprint targeted Mediacom Communications in a suit alleging that the cable operator had violated more than a dozen patents tied to VoIP services.

Cable’s Dense Infrastructure Suited for 5G Small Cell Networks: Analyst

Jeff Baumgartner — Mon, 15 May 2017 21:25:00 +0000

In March, Neil Smit, the former CEO of Comcast’s cable unit, said a recent study from outside independent experts found that the MSO’s fiber network plans showed “excellent compatibility” with 5G. Research from a top industry analyst seems to share that position, at least when it comes to the fiber part.

“At first blush, cable’s dense wired infrastructure deep into residential areas would seem ideally suited for deploying small cells/5G using high frequency spectrum,” Craig Moffett, analyst with MoffettNathanson noted Monday in a second report about small cells providing the underpinning infrastructure for 5G.

However, the “relevant infrastructure,” at least for the densest part of the capillary network, is primarily coax, not fiber, he added.

He outlined a couple of possibilities for the cable industry – that cable has an incremental cost advantage in deploying fiber by virtue of its existing assets to support small cell networks that require fiber, or that the engineers will figure out a way to “make it work” as it did earlier with high-speed Internet using DOCSIS.

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Moffett said the first possibility – the cost advantage of deploying fiber off the existing assets, -- appear somewhat limited, as most cable plant is aerial, not buried, and because utility poles are subject to fairly permissive attachment rules that other players can take advantage of.

As for that second possibility: “[Could a bunch of really smart engineers figure out a way to make it work? Perhaps. Time will tell,” he said.

Notably, the cable industry continues to get more bang out of its HFC networks with DOCSIS 3.1, a multi-gigabit platform, and its pursuit of Full Duplex DOCSIS, a longer term annex to D3.1 that will support symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds.

“The industry’s network assets appeared to give it a leg up, at least as it pertained to small cell deployments (although it lacked the macro network, brand equity, and distribution resources of the incumbents,” the analyst explained.

Earlier in the report, Moffett held that Verizon’s wireline/wireless network in Boston, where the telco said it would need 1,700 strands of fiber in each cable, sheds lots of light on the amount of glass Verizon will need.

RELATED: Verizon Adding Lots of Fiber to Diet for 5G Rollout

“Most industry observers tend to think of fiber counts of 100 and up as high. With both its words and actions, Verizon scuttled that convention and made clear that it views the fiber assets in the market today as wholly inadequate for its small cell and, eventually, 5G needs,” he wrote.

Moffett also doesn’t believe that Verizon will be able to pull it all off in-house, while also acknowledging that the “gargantuan fiber counts” for Verizon in Boston aren’t “representative of the baseline standard for all its markets.”

He said it is reasonable to thing that Verizon will have to partner with a “natural partner” such as Zayo Group to maximize the amount of network it can deploy per dollar invested.

However, Moffett questions whether it makes sense for Verizon to buy Zayo. Zayo’s core business is dark fiber leasing, making it a neutral host arms dealer, and that core business would not be as effective if it was under Verizon’s control.

“Customers avoided doing business with direct competitors when feasible,” Moffett wrote.