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. ■

Despite what appeared to be significant increases in videoconferencing activity during the pandemic, video streaming accounted for 71% of all downstream U.S. internet usage in 2020, said the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, in a new report spotlighting network data consumption last year. 

Streaming was actually upon 70% over the pre-pandemic 2019 frame, the cable operator said. 

And despite the rapid emergence of "Zoom" in the popular lexicon, videoconferencing only accounted for 5% of U.S. network data usage last year, the cable company added. 

The Comcast report, titled 2020 Network Data, serves as a kind of self back pat for Comcast, which touts a $15 billion investment in network infrastructure, starting in 2017, as the key reason it was able to keep up with downstream traffic demands that peaked at 38% over the 2019 level, and upstream demands that increased 56%.

“The internet was a bright spot during the darkest hours of 2020, keeping hundreds of millions of people connected to work, school, entertainment, and most importantly, each other,” said Tony Werner, president of technology, product and “Xperience” at Comcast Cable, in a statement.

Among other tidbits from the report, Comcast said that traffic patterns remain “highly asymmetrical,” with downstream traffic still 14 times higher than upstream volumes. 

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.”

Comcast’s top technologists, Tony Werner, said peak internet traffic has increased as much 60% in places like San Francisco and Seattle. But the cable company’s network has so far had more than enough capacity to handled the sudden increase in usage brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The network is performing well,” Werner said during an afternoon conference call with reporters, orchestrated on a remote basis, with Comcast keeping employees at its Philadelphia headquarters at home. 

Werner, who serves as president of technology, product and experience for Comcast Cable, said overall peak network usage has increased 32% across Comcast’s national network. Peak usage now comes at around 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. he said, with most customers pushing up their most data-intensive activity—video entertainment streaming and gaming—up from the typical 9 p.m. peak. 

There was an overall 38% increase in streaming video usage last week over more typical comparable period, Werner said. Comcast, he noted, has no plans to ask streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon to downgrade their bitrates and decrease their loads on its network. 

Videoconferencing usage is up 212%.

And overall WiFi usage is way up—on Xfinity mobile, there’s a 10% decline in cellular LTE usage and a 24% increase in reliance on the WiFi network, with homebound users staying more tied to the latter. 

Werner began the teleconference rendering an assertion already made familiar by national leadership—despite several decades of best-selling novels, box-office hits, and regular warnings by organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization, he said “nobody saw this coming.”

In the Q&A portion of the teleconference, Werner clarified that comment: “I don’t think we were too blindsided,” he said. “I can’t speak for others, and I can’t speak for the globe. But our networks are engineered for great fluctuations. We engineer them for peaks. And I think the industry is in pretty good shape.” 

Had this sudden rush occurred 25 years ago, in the age of the public switched telephone network, “we would have been in trouble,” Werner said. 

San Francisco and Seattle, which have big tech companies full of cutting-edge technology adopters, have provided the best test cases for Comcast, with companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple sending their employees home to work earlier than most in the pandemic cycle. If Comcast’s network can handle data usage increases of around 60% in these regions, Werner surmised, it should be able to handle peaks that are emerging in other markets, like Chicago. 

Comcast has stepped up its number of “network augments,” he added, executing 1,700 last week compared to a typical 400-500. These augments include things like laying more fiber and just generally “turning dials,” trying to maximize the capacity of the network. 

He said that deployment of a new network optimization software called PMA has increased capacity by 10%-30% in some cases. 

Overall, Werner said there’s been little to no change in the network speeds Comcast customers are experiencing. 

He explained that the cable company works 12 to 24 months out from expected capacity needs, which he said increase by 45% a year, on average. 

“Peak traffic is what we engineer our network for,” he said. 

Comcast’s top technologist, Tony Werner, said peak internet traffic has increased as much 60% in places like San Francisco and Seattle. But the cable company’s network has so far had more than enough capacity to handle the sudden increase in usage brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The network is performing well,” Werner said during an afternoon conference call with reporters, orchestrated on a remote basis, with Comcast keeping employees at its Philadelphia headquarters at home.

Werner, who serves as president of technology, product and experience for Comcast Cable, said overall peak network usage has increased 32% across Comcast’s national network. Peak usage now comes at around 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. he said, with most customers pushing up their most data-intensive activity—video entertainment streaming and gaming—up from the typical 9 p.m. peak.

There was an overall 38% increase in streaming video usage last week over a more typical comparable period, Werner said. Comcast, he noted, has no plans to ask streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon to downgrade their bitrates and decrease their loads on its network.

Videoconferencing usage is up 212%.

And overall WiFi usage is way up—on Xfinity mobile, there’s a 10% decline in cellular LTE usage and a 24% increase in reliance on the WiFi network, with homebound users staying more tied to the latter.

Werner began the teleconference rendering an assertion already made familiar by national leadership—despite several decades of best-selling novels, box-office hits, and regular warnings by organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization, he said “nobody saw this coming.”

In the Q&A portion of the teleconference, Werner clarified that comment: “I don’t think we were too blindsided,” he said. “I can’t speak for others, and I can’t speak for the globe. But our networks are engineered for great fluctuations. We engineer them for peaks. And I think the industry is in pretty good shape.”

Had this sudden rush occurred 25 years ago, in the age of the public switched telephone network, “we would have been in trouble,” Werner said.

San Francisco and Seattle, which have big tech companies full of cutting-edge technology adopters, have provided the best test cases for Comcast, with companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple sending their employees home to work earlier than most in the pandemic cycle. If Comcast’s network can handle data usage increases of around 60% in these regions, Werner said, it should be able to handle peaks that are emerging in other markets, like Chicago.

Comcast has stepped up its number of “network augments,” he added, executing 1,700 last week compared to a typical 400-500. These augments include things like laying more fiber and just generally “turning dials,” trying to maximize the capacity of the network.

He said that deployment of a new network optimization software called PMA has increased capacity by 10%-30% in some cases.

Overall, Werner said there’s been little to no change in the network speeds Comcast customers are experiencing.

He explained that the cable company works 12 to 24 months out from expected capacity needs, which he said increase by 45% a year, on average.

“Peak traffic is what we engineer our network for,” he said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future

MCN:What matters beyond speed and throughput/range and reach for some of the services headed our way -- augmented reality, augmented discovery, VR, aging in place, automation, healthcare? Pick your favorite.
Jay Rolls: What matters is network latency, and overall visibility. Things like AR and health care and adjacent verticals -- it’s all about interactivity, and the rapid translation of photons to electrons.

Technologies like 802.11ax will help with the latency quest, which will be never-ending. And real-time, local visibility into how the network is running will help us to deliver a consistently high quality of experience, across devices.

Kevin Hart: We're very excited about home healthcare...around enabling the aging population. Just based on demographics, there's a huge need and a huge opportunity, but within the network some of the artificial intelligence and some of the connectivity speeds but also some of the privacy components around HIPAA-compliant information ...are also important.

The infrastructure we're putting into place, from a speed [perspective] is great, but privacy and security and latency, some of the real-time responses, I think will become even more important as you see more [need] for remote healthcare monitoring and more healthcare-centric solutions over time.

Dan Hennessy: Other network conditions start to come in to play here, like latency, jitter, and packet loss.
We have equipment distributed across our footprint and in our network that allows us to closely monitor these parameters – to ensure that we know if it changes, why it changed, and what it means to the customer. This will become increasingly important. New standards, such as DOCSIS 3.1, also have targeted changes to improve the quality of service.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

For sure, what we expect, and as discussed in context of IoT, is a continued growth in devices. Giving our customers visibility and control is key. Making sure their devices get the right priority, and remain secure, powered, live and connected on the network -- as more and more devices connect and need proper “care and feeding” -- becomes more critical to day-to-day life.

MCN: How has your reliance on the public cloud evolved over the last couple of years? Are you using more public or private cloud, and why does that matter?
KH: It's really a hybrid of all of the above, based on the use case. We're doing a lot of things internally and some our own cloud capabilities with infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service and some of the things we're doing around virtualization. We also use third-party clouds where it makes sense, based on their skillsets and capability. And from a managed service perspective, we have some product and service offerings leveraging cloud-based components. But now that you've adopted this hybrid cloud environment, it's now about how do you optimize it for performance and cost and security -- that's probably the next frontier.

JR: We rely on both -- private and public. Both are good at different things, and the crux of it is taking advantage of what they’re good at. For instance, the public cloud is good for things that need velocity -- prototyping, instantaneous scaling. The private cloud is more for things that are in production, which need to be highly secure. A good example is cloud DVR. Cloud DVR is obviously going to need a lot of cloud infrastructure, but it’s also well understood, with well-defined metrics. Because you know how it’s going to perform, it’s just going to be more cost effective to do on a private cloud.

MCN: What is the right balance of engineering talent you need these days, and how do you attract it?
Tony Werner: We do a lot of recruiting, especially when we’re speaking at non-traditional industry events. The right balance is a tricky task - we still need RF engineers, because we still operate a lot of RF. We still need infrastructure experts, because we operate a significant infrastructure. In general, though, it’s software, systems, and architectural engineering talent that we seek. We’ve made significant strides in how we attract that talent, primarily by making sure that Comcast is a great environment for developers and innovators to come work, but we can always do more.

JR Walden: We're finding less need for HFC talent every day, in part because you still have a lot in the organization, so demands are kind of in the decline. Five to ten years ago, it was hard finding network skills. The battle for high-speed data is over. Cable has won. And most people in professional areas see that, so people with networking skills who have interest in being in the internet business are finding us a lot more than ever before.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

The area of challenge is on the software side. That has been tougher. I guess the good news is that being near New York doesn’t make for the most inexpensive job market, but people with those skills in New York are definitely not working for .com companies. At least I'm not competing for that talent. We've been plucking millennials straight out of college and teaching them ourselves and hoping that they don't leave too quickly. But we seem to be doing okay keeping the folks we have sort of home-grown.

KH: Investing in our people and our talent is a top priority at Cox in both product and technology and training and skillsets. [In early October], my team worked on an operating model of the future for the team, but software-enabled everything is critical, virtualization is critical, cybersecurity skills are paramount.

We bring in talent through recruiting and through our third-party vendors and we also have a very robust co-op and intern programs, and interns from leading schools like George Tech right here in Atlanta. Tulsa is one of our markets, and they have one of the top cybersecurity schools in the country. We're bringing in interns and co-ops and recruits from these feeder schools and also brining in talent with a lot of experience, as well, from some of these new trending areas, like mobility, IP, cybersecurity, etc.

DH: Our move away from closed vendor ecosystems to open, embedded software development -- either directly ourselves or with partners – means we must ensure that we have the right talent onboard. It’s these engineers that drive our business forward.

Over the last 12 months we have brought our technology group together across Europe, which gives a truly global opportunity for our engineers and developers to build products and services -- all the way from the UK, Germany and Switzerland, through to Eastern Europe, and across to Latin American and the Caribbean. Whether it’s fixed or mobile access, Internet, TV and video, or a full suite of B2B services. That’s a pretty rare opportunity.

JR: The right balance is the technologist who has a degree of nimbleness between hardware and software, and tends to think about things from a systems perspective. We’ve been surprised to see talent coming to our Denver engineering groups from Silicon Valley. The recurring themes appear to be both quality of life, and cost of living. I think you’ll see more and more evidence that shows a talent shift in our collective direction, and that’s really gratifying.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable

Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent


MCN: To what extent are you gearing up to automate people’s homes to make them more useful?
Dan Hennessy: Our automation focus is very much linked to our core products and services, and where we can bring clear value right now: Voice search and control of our video services. Ensuring that all our platforms work in harmony. Installing new hardware in the home, like WiFi APs, such that it happens seamlessly. Giving customers a way to easily onboard third party IoT devices in their home.

What’s as important here is the business logic we’re building in our back office for “connectivity services.” It’s similar to what we’ve done for our video products and services, in terms of having a flexible, microservices-based back end that is open to third party integration.

JR Walden: We're an Icontrol affiliate [Comcast and Alarm.com bought pieces of Icontrol earlier this year]. It hasn’t been a huge business for us. I think we have concerns that trying to compete with CE companies in that space...is going to be tough for Icontrol, let alone Mediacom.

We want to be a service provider. We think we're good at being a service provider, so what’s the service here? We imagine providing some services to help facilitate and manage the customer's smart home and IoT device future. I don't know if we'll manage the service as a whole...but we think there's a place to play there. Like maybe you could use your Amazon Echo to do things on your TiVo set-top box...rather than using the remote or using a voice remote.

Rather than trying to be the guy who does everything, let's work with what people want, even if Google Home is the device or it's an Amazon device. We’re going to come out with a voice remote, too, that works with Nuance [Communications].

Kevin Hart: We're making great advances in our connected home and smart home platforms. We’re leveraging the existing platform, but we've also got other future-state possibilities, and coupling the Cox HomeLife platform offering with our Panoramic WiFi [product]. We've been going market to market and connecting a home and making it a true smart home with over 50 or so connected devices in the home, and virtual reality and home care demos, robotic dogs, you name it. We're also doing a little bit some remote healthcare monitoring. There's a lot of possibilities here and I think we're just scratching the surface of the industry.

Tony Werner: With the combination of xFi and Xfinity Home we think we’re in an ideal position to give our customers a simple one-stop solution for controlling their connected homes. With xFi, we take the mystery and guesswork out of our customers’ home WiFi networks, providing a real-time dashboard of what devices are on the network and how they are performing. With Xfinity Home, we’ve combined a powerful home security solution, with an increasingly integrated IoT hub. Through our “Works With Xfinity” program, our customers can control their Nest thermostats, August locks, Chamberlin garage door openers, and many other popular IoT devices all from their Xfinity Home app. We are continuously bringing more partners onto the platform. On the backend, we’re leveraging machine learning and our own homegrown rules engine to give our customers more pinpoint control over how their connected homes work.

MCN: In what ways is AI and machine learning guiding your technology strategy?
DH: AI and ML already exist in our businesses in a number of different areas -- both embedded in our products and services, and also as part of a number of new avenues we’re investigating. Not just customer facing, but for operational and engineering analytics use cases, too.

We’re using machine learning, for instance, to help us fine tune our understanding of how WiFi performs in our customer’s homes. RF modeling, and knowing those behaviors, can get us so far. Adding in telemetry from our devices in the field, and ML in the backend infrastructure, takes our insights to the next level.

Additionally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the associated AI is already deployed as part of our voice search and personalization services. We see much more applicability here in the front lines of our business, where interactions across 24 million customers can be tailored much more accurately.

The key with AI and ML is telemetry and data management. To leverage these techniques, we need to be able to collect and analyze data. From that, we can affect changes back into our services and infrastructure -- whether this is across the network, our service platforms, or our care and operational support systems.

A big step in the right direction is to understand the art of the possible. We’re starting to innovate with partners, internally. We’ve started with multiple trials, and some first deployments as well.

Jay Rolls: Both AI and ML will play an increasing role across our technology stacks, from network management to troubleshooting to connecting customers with the content they want. I think as our networks become denser and more complex, adding more intelligence will help us mine data that matters to the overall success of the businesses.

MCN: What does the Internet of Things mean to your company?
KH: From a product standpoint, some of the analytics that are built into the products, whether they’re visual analytics or voice analytics are making the products more intelligent and more personal. The voice remote stuff is cool on the front end, but having contacts and predicting your next couple moves in the connected home are a big part of what you'll see more and more of on the product roadmap.

From a technology operational network perspective, there's things we are doing with software-defined networking and some of the intelligence we’re building in through software and quality of service and latency. And from an operational perspective, doing more and more with some of the artificial intelligence around quality of service, call-in rates and truck roll reduction and customer experience. It's early days, but we've seen some very promising results.

JR: Whether it’s ensuring security and privacy, or connecting customers to specific capabilities, like health monitoring and wellness -- the IoT scene, which our customers are bringing onto our networks by the handfuls, enables us to take a customer-centric approach. The key to the IoT and our industry is that it’s based on the common denominator of connectivity.

TW: We are committed to AI and machine learning, because we’ve seen firsthand how those technologies can make our products better and improve the customer experience. We use AI and Machine Learning algorithms today to advance and refine our Natural Language Processing platform, detect and fix incidents in our network, and help our customers find content they love. We’ve got a first-rate team of PhDs working on these technologies day and night, and customers are already seeing that reflected in the products they use every day.

DH: Opportunity, more than anything. We’re seeing an explosion in connected devices, for sure, and the need for seamless onboarding, increased visibility, control, configuration and management. This is a key consideration as we think about how we develop our connectivity products and services.

Our customers rely on us to ensure their home network is secure, effective, and above all, is just there. Available. The key will be which devices and services our customers bring into their homes. The IoT market remains fragmented, from a service and technology standards point of view (Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT etc.) We’re experimenting with most of these.

We also see many new partnership possibilities opening up, with both established and new players. The IoT landscape brings in very diverse industries -- from lighting, to kitchen goods, home security and other utilities. How these will play out, and where the value and roles lie, is still a work in progress.

Beyond residential, we’re seeing plenty of interest in the B2B segment. We have a number of trials with home builders and commercial real estate firms, where mutual opportunities exist. Whether it’s environmental sensors and control, WiFi coverage and management, broader sensor and device onboarding, or management.

MCN: What matters when the task is securing the physical home, as well as the digital stuff in it?
TW: One of our over-arching product goals is to provide equipment and services that behave like a courteous guest in the home. Always there, always on, always connected, and pleasing to the eye, but also always on the lookout. Our Xfinity Home product started out as a physical home security offering, and quickly expanded into automation and smart home. A big part of that overall philosophy is to safeguard for both physical belongings, and digital identities.

JR: It’s a one-word answer: Trust. We’re in a unique position, because we are poised to protect between the physical, and the digital. As IP-connected devices proliferate, in the home and the business, we are becoming the trusted entity. Both for reliable service, as well as stewards of security.

DH: Trust is key here, of course – with an operational model that truly supports the offering. In both residential and B2B markets, local regulation and standards compliance will influence our interest and ability to enter this market. We also don’t see (for now) the same degree of demand as we see in other markets (notably North America) for these services.

The focus of the cable industry used to be a lot simpler. Its lens was generally trained on how to deliver and wield a quality package of pay TV, broadband and voice service that could be used to thwart competition from the telcos and satellite-TV providers.

These days, those service and tech strategies also place a heavy emphasis on wireless (WiFi, in and out of the home, and mobile) and over-the-top video (as an emerging competitor and complementary offering). To support current services and those that are out on the horizon, cable operators are also moving ahead with strategies and architectures that help them use their existing bandwidth more efficiently, or by adding capacity through projects and initiatives such as DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS.

To get a fix on these areas of importance ahead of this month’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver (Oct. 17-20), Multichannel News caught up with a handful of top technology and engineering executives.

Taking part in this year’s virtual tech roundtable — an aggregation of separate interviews with MCN technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and columnist Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits — were:
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications;
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global;
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications;
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications; and
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable.

The 2017 Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your priorities, as it relates to network capacity?
Jay Rolls: Our priority is to constantly balance capacity against demand. It’s a never-ending quest. We watch it very closely, and we’re very pragmatic about it -- the volume of tools, metrics and ways to see what’s really happening, and invest accordingly, is really deepening in ways that matter.

Tony Werner: We’ve been on a pretty steady path of doubling our network capacity every 18-24 months for several years, and I don’t see anything that makes me think that will change. We’re making better and faster products for our customers who expect and deserve world-class online experiences, and the network has to deliver on that promise. The key from my perspective is staying ahead of that curve in a way that’s smart and future-proof. We’ve been strategically extending fiber further into our network to meet customer demand, and that effort, combined with our commitment to deploying DOCSIS 3.1 has given us a network that’s powerful, flexible, and ready for what’s next.

JR Walden: We have completed the removal of all the analog channels. That was the big step one. Step two was to start transitioning high-speed data over to DOCSIS 3.1, so we're not adding any more 3.0 channels, and reuse spectrum for 3.1, which is a bit more efficient. The whole company is 3.1, all of the modems we're buying since June have been 3.1, so we've begun that next transition. 

We're in the process of migrating to MPEG-4, mostly the HDs. That's following along with some of our set-top refresh -- getting some of the old MPEG-2-only capable boxes out of the network and we can transition more of the channels to MPEG-4. 

Right on the heels of that, we're going to start moving some channels, the lower-viewed channels and some premiums, over to IP. We're also reducing node sizes. We average about 285 homes to 290 homes per node as an average. 

Kevin Hart: Ultimately, our goal is to continue to provide a great customer experience with a competitive broadband product and service. To do that, we are continuing to keep pace with downstream and upstream data rates, which is key to being competitive with our speed offerings, and quality of service. Reducing latency is also a top priority.

We’re investing in the network and in those growth rates, in terms of downstream and upstream speeds. Those are key drivers. Ultimately, providing that in-home or on-premises (business) experience, with our WiFi products — is equally important.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Dan Hennessy: We see demand increasing by up to 45% across our markets and in recent years, we responded with a wide deployment of CCAP [converged cable access platform] equipment throughout our footprint. That investment, along with ongoing node size optimization, enabled us to increase capacity at a much faster rate. As a result, 70 – 80% of our plant will be DOCSIS 3.1 ready by the end of next year, giving us a path to even greater capacity expansion allowing us to continue to increase the available capacity across our access network, upstream and downstream 

MCN: What is your strategy with regard to fiber?
TW: Suffice it to say that fiber plays a key role on our network architecture. Our network today contains more than 150,000 route miles of fiber, and to meet customer demand, we extend fiber further into the neighborhoods we serve each year. When it comes to delivering gigabit speeds, our focus is obviously on DOCSIS 3.1, and our new xFi Advanced Gateway, which will bring Gig availability to more people, in more markets than ever before. But part of the reason we’re able to deliver that capacity is because we’ve systematically enhanced our network with fiber.

I feel pretty strongly that the best path ahead is to leverage the existing coaxial network and DOCSIS resources to the fullest, then inch towards FTTH, over time. Why? Because we can. We don’t have to build an entire network just to turn up one customer.

KH: Once you leverage the existing coax that we have, by taking fiber deep toward an N+0 architecture, we're future-proofing our investment , we're positioning ourselves to leverage DOCSIS 3.1, and also position ourselves for Full Duplex, because symmetrical speeds will be important. 

And we're also thinking about the fiber investment and fiber deep as it relates to our wireless strategy, enabling some of our customer with a small cell strategy but also positioning ourselves to take advantage of that in the future as well as thinking about fiber deep to benefit both residential and our commercial customers simultaneously. 

We've got a ten-year network 2.0 network transformation plan, and fiber deep, DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex are at the core of what's driving the investment. 

DH: We’re aggressively future-proofing our network. Over 80% of our new build program is based on a combination of either fiber-deep, retaining the HFC final drop, or fiber-to-the-home.

The U.K. is a good example -- that’s where our “Project Lightning” network expansion initiative is happening (announced in early 2015). Cable network build had been very limited in parts of the U.K. since the ‘80s, and until a few years ago and is now benefiting from this fiber strategy.

JW: [Fiber deep] is a bit further out, at least as a large-scale type of project. I think fiber deep for MDUs, high-density areas and some planned communities, higher end communities doing deeper fiber or fiber-to-the-home [is happening]. But as a wholesale [change] and going to node+0 kind of architecture, I don't see that in the next two years. 

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

JR: Fiber-deep is part of the overall capacity conversation. We’re constantly analyzing and monitoring our infrastructure, and matching those results against the technologies we have in our portfolio -- whether that’s DOCSIS 3.1, or taking fiber deeper, or Full Duplex DOCSIS. It’s a rational approach, where we’re trying to balance the needs, the available technologies, and the costs. DOCSIS 3.1 has some pretty remarkable capabilities, but it’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast reason to not take fiber deeper, for instance. Different situations drive different capacity decisions. There’s nothing universal about it -- you have to take it on a market-by-market basis.

MCN: To what extent will you use bridging techniques, like remote PHY & DOCSIS 3.1?
DH: We’re already trialing and testing both Remote PHY and DOCSIS 3.1 across our footprint. Our plan of record is to exploit virtualized and distributed access architectures.

Our strategy is fully focused on leveraging 3.1 and cost to upgrade is less than 20 Euro per home passed, so a very efficient way of getting to speeds of 1 Gbps-plus.

KH: We're making tremendous progress in calendar year 2017 on our DOCSIS 3.1 CCAP deployment. We started in earnest early in the year and by the end of this year, we'll have over one-third of our footprint 3.1-enabled with north of 90% of our footprint enabled with 3.1 by the end of 2018 and early 2019. We're definitely going to be leveraging a remote PHY architecture and some of the early stage testing around remote PHY currently. 

JR: They both play a role. Just like DOCSIS 3.0 and PON played a role in the evolution of the network over the past five years, DOCSIS 3.1 and remote PHY are going to play a major role in the coming years. Everyone will be using them, us included. Like everything else, it’s a matter of matching the right tool to the right task.

TW: I could tell you how committed we are to DOCSIS 3.1, but it may be easier just to lay out our progress to date. Since December 2015, when we provisioned the world’s first DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network, we have been aggressively expanding our D3.1-powered gigabit offering. Today, we have deployed D3.1 in 23 states and dozens of markets, with more coming online all the time. What I love about this technology is that it is a cost-effective way to make gigabit speeds a reality for a far broader cross-section of Americans, and not just to those lucky few who live in a few select neighborhoods. As for remote PHY and DAA [Distributed Access Architecture], both technologies are advancing at a breakneck clip, and I think you’ll hear more from us about them soon. 

MCN: What are the consumer factors pushing you toward the desire to provide symmetrical bandwidth, and eventually take advantage of technologies like Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX)?
JR: The world of applications and services continues to evolve, obviously, but so far we’ve been able to meet those needs with an asymmetrical topology. That said, things like real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things -- some of those will likely drive more symmetry in the network. It remains to be seen. Whether it goes completely crazy, or just nudges the demand on the network, it’s good to have techniques like FDX on the drawing board.

KH: It’s a little but further out on the horizon. The upstream growth rate is ticking up a couple of notches, but not to the tune that we would need significant additional capacity and/or a complementary need for symmetrical bandwidth. We're still testing that, but the experiences, the gaming, the latency and interactive [applications] and additionally connected everything, I think, will be drivers of higher need for improved symmetrical speeds. But at this stage, the symmetrical is a nice-to-have for residential and definitely will be a good option for our commercial customers. 

DH: Presently, both our products and the consumption of those products are highly asymmetric. While we see some increase in upstream demand from cloud-based services, we don’t see the asymmetry changing any time soon.

Because of that, we are actively engaged with CableLabs and industry partners on the development of Full Duplex. We see it as part of our future access toolkit.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|The Home of the Future|Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your wireless priorities?
Dan Hennessy: We believe that connectivity to the home, around the home, and on the go needs to be a high performance, reliable and seamless experience.  As such, we are focused on three areas.

For fixed broadband connectivity services in the home, we want to ensure that our customers are able to benefit from the power of our network -- both to and around the home. That’s regardless of where they live, what their home is like (how big and what it’s made of), or how many devices they want to connect to their in home WiFi. This is where a significant amount of engineering and innovation effort is spent.

From a mobile services perspective, it’s about making sure our customers get the best quad-play deal and experience out there. To do that, we will build on our MVNO capabilities across our markets. Where needed, we want to leverage VoWiFi technologies, to solve for in-home/business coverage issues. As well, we want to ensure that our customers are able to leverage our WiFi access points--roughly 10 million, across Europe. The goal is to bring the fixed and mobile connectivity experience together, seamlessly. To give our customers the best of both.

The third areas is specific to where we have a full MNO footprint, such as in Belgium. Telenet’s acquisition of the mobile operator, BASE, presented an opportunity to upgrade and deliver a world-class radio access network -- alongside the power of a cable access network.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Jay Rolls: First is the launch of WiFi-first MVNO service with Verizon next year, which will serve us well for our short- and medium-term wireless goals.

Second is optimizing the WiFi experience for our residential and business customers. So many people equate “the internet” to “the WiFi signal”! That’s why it’s important that we continue to improve everyone’s WiFi.

Beyond that, we’re conducting both lab and field trials of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service), in the unlicensed 3.5 GHz spectrum, as well as 5G millimeter wave technologies for fixed use cases, like backhaul.

Kevin Hart: The in-home experience, the on-premises experience and the experience within common spaces in MDUs -- about a third of our residential footprint is multi-dwelling units, so having a having a best-in-class WiFi experience there is key. We've also done a ton with convention centers with hospitality networks and hotels. We made an investment in a company [Blueprint RF, acquired by Cox over the summer] that's going to be bring best in class WiFi for commercial businesses. 

We’ve done some 5G trials, in conjunction with CableLabs. From a technical standpoint, we’ve been one of the leaders in small cell deployments, because of what we’ve been doing with some of our key partners and customers. The 5G trial was a fixed point to point [test]...just to prove out some of the technology and the performance.

JR Walden: We've been focused on in-home WiFi for many years. Maybe 60% of our customers pay us for a managed home WiFi solution. About 90% of our new customers do take that product. We have also been rolling out community WiFi, or metro WiFi...in a number of our communities, but not as aggressively as some of the big guys as we tend to have more low-density markets. I’m not necessarily convinced there are any business models around that. The theory around that is it's a customer affinity [strategy]. But it's not super-expensive to do, so you don't have to gamble too much on that. 

In regards to getting into more of a mobile play, we certainly haven't announced any plans. We've certainly been looking at what options might be and things like 5G and CBRS or other kind of solutions might impact us, both as a B2B or wholesale kind of enabler, like we were with cell tower backhaul, but also potentially getting into the retail side. 

That's one of those areas we'd rather be a fast-follower, frankly, so I’ll root for Comcast or Charter or somebody to blaze a successful trail, and then maybe we'll be prepared to invest in that. 

MCN: What are you doing to make WiFi better or best in class?
Tony Werner: We’re committed to offering a fantastic Wi-Fi experience to our customers, and from our perspective, that means providing a combination of speed, coverage and control. When it comes to speed, our xFi Advanced Gateway is not just the fastest gateway we’ve ever built, we believe it is the best device available today anywhere in the world.

On coverage, we want our customers to have amazing online experiences wherever they go, in or out of the home. On the go, that means continuing to expand our network of more than 18 million Wi-Fi hot spots, and at home, it’s a combination of our world-class gateway, and our forthcoming pods, which will give customers who want it a powerful Wi-Fi mesh network that can blanket any size home with great Wi-Fi. Finally, on control, we really believe xFi is a game changer. We launched it in May to more than 10 million devices, and the response we’ve seen has been tremendous, both in terms of adoption, and customer satisfaction. Today with xFi, our customers can pause WiFi to their kids’ devices for bedtime or dinner (our most popular feature), track the activity of devices on their home networks, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.

In addition, as you know we’re big proponents of RDK-B, where the B stands for “broadband.” It’s similar intent to RDK-V, video, which is the core foundation of our X1 UI. RDK-B is piled with techniques and technologies to continuously improve WiFi experiences.

KH: On the residential side, our offering, called Panoramic WiFi with the tagline of "It's wall to wall fast," has had an excellent take rate from a customer perspective. NPS (net promoter score) is up significantly. It's a combination of having a better in-home device, a professional install and additional to make sure your signal strength, location, quality of service is what you want it to be inside your premises. 

DH: Our WiFi strategy focuses on both raw hardware capabilities, and the software we use to optimize for value and performance. Both solve for whole home connectivity. We are constantly evaluating hardware-related developments and standards to include in the equipment we deploy in customers’ homes.

Alongside that, we are focused on software developments (embedded and cloud-based) to optimize WiFi range, reliability and performance. That means channel optimization, air time fairness, band- and client-steering. We have a range of embedded software and cloud-based services going to market in 2017 and 2018.

We’re also looking at the best ways to give our customers the right equipment to ensure whole home coverage, from point-of-sale to care. This includes developing a mix of property profiling (size, fabrication etc.) and machine learning techniques.

Making WiFi better for our customers is very much about giving them visibility and control.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

Ensuring all the hardware and technology we’re using works in harmony, such that the customer can see it, configure, it, and personalize it. We’re doing this with our “Connect” app, which – in addition to allowing them to manage their mobile tariffs and access hotspots while on the go -- brings all of this to the customer. Whether it’s parental controls, guest WiFi access, speed tests, onboarding of powerline devices, resetting passwords. It’s all the things our customers would and should expect. Meaning WiFi that consistently works well, with control in the palm of their hand.

JR: We’re currently deploying 802.11ac Wave 2 in the home, which has impressively nerdy feature names, like beam-steering and multi-user operation. Bottom line, they make the signals behave better in a given (and often hostile) environment. We’re also actively testing the benefits of 802.11ax, which works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectral areas and enables multi-gigabit speeds.

On top of that, we’re planning a 2018 deployment of cloud-based radio resource management, which is all about optimizing the WiFi experience -- it takes some of what’s traditionally been processed locally, and pulls it back into the network. And, we’re testing some distributed WiFi solutions, to expand indoor coverage.

MCN: Is 5G an opportunity for small cell and backhaul, or a threat to the last mile? (A little bit of both?)
JW: The business model [for 5G] kind of confuses me some. For the markets that Mediacom operates in, which are much lower density than maybe the average -- we're well below 50 homes a mile. Although we don’t have as many line-of-sight issues with many tall buildings, the reach of these very high frequencies are really going to limit their use in lower density markets. 

I realize that Verizon and others are talking about 5G...but it's starting to feel a lot like 3D, in that there's a ton of talk about it, but when you go and look at the engineering, this is not going to be like LTE. When 4G came along, it was really about enabling a new frequency and new, more efficient protocols. This is fundamentally a different architecture. You're not going to enable with this with macro towers; you're going to have to build a whole new network to do this. And it's going to cost a lot of money. I think they have the performance to compete with landlines, but I don't think they have the capacity...at any cost-effective rate to really compete with landline. 

JR: It’s both, but probably more of an opportunity for backhaul. I mean, in rural areas, or very non-dense areas, having a wireless option, vs. wired, may make sense. We’re testing 5G for both, but to us it looks better for fixed use cases. That’s because millimeter wave comes with very large channel sizes, that can offer very high bandwidth -- but at those frequencies, propagation can be really challenging. Anything in the line of sight -- a tree, a building -- can mess things up.

DH: We don’t see 5G as a threat to the last mile. For starters, the economics aren’t there, at least in the foreseeable future. Plus, a 5G last mile will not offer the performance equivalent to fiber rich and deep access networks.

Spectrally, 5G performance will require larger bandwidths, which implies higher frequency spectrum and the use of advanced radio technologies, such as Massive MIMO or coordinated multi-site transmissions.

Higher spectral bands imply denser deployments of radio access nodes (smaller cells) with more backhaul locations, so for sure there are opportunities to scale backhaul revenues here.

When asked what a good coverage 5G access network might look like, I often point to one of our cable access maps showing our WiFi hotspots.

Ultimately, it’s not a question of 5G or cable access in the last mile. More, it’s a question of how will 5G radio access and fixed, fiber-rich cable access complement each other. Just like how unlicensed WiFi radio access compliments fixed cable access today.

KH: It is a little bit of both. From a technical perspective, we're taking advantage of some of the small cell opportunities.  

#NYCTVWK: ‘B&C’ Hall of Fame, VR 20/20 Kick Off Fifth Annual Event|Register Here

PHILADELPHIA — The old axiom that the only constant is change was in play at last week’s annual SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, as operators keyed on new technologies and platforms that will drive the industry forward in the years ahead.

And many of those discussions and new products aren’t emerging just to help technology take a leap forward for technology’s sake, but because MSOs will need them to keep their future business models from breaking.

With that as the backdrop, workshops, panels and keynotes spanned cable’s engineering gamut, but there was a particular emphasis this year around areas such as network virtualization and distributed access architectures, multiyear power savings and reduction initiatives, as well as next-generation, speedy platforms like DOCSIS3.1, and a new annex for D3.1 in the works called Full- Duplex DOCSIS.

THE FUTURE WILL BE VIRTUALIZED

The industry’s shift to distributed and virtualized networks is one that is not just filling a technology gap, but one that apparently will be necessary from a business perspective as MSOs are required to tack on capacity to keep up with the bandwidth demands of consumers and business customers alike.

An opening session panel featuring top industry engineering executives offered some hard truths on why distributed architectures and the virtualization of network functions have rapidly moved to the forefront of cable’s tech agenda.

Boiled down: Older, legacy models, driven by purpose-built hardware, simply won’t work anymore.

There’s a huge “disconnect” between the data that people are consuming and what cable operators must spend to keep up with that demand, Balan Nair, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Liberty Global, said in a wide-ranging panel session that was moderated by Bob Stanzione, executive chairman and board chairman of Arris.

In terms of network capacity planning, Liberty Global is already allocating enough bandwidth to deliver an average of about 1 Mbps per sub. With annual capacity growth in the range of 30% to 40% per year, it won’t be long before that hits 2 Mbps per subscriber.

For Liberty Global, that would equate to about 25 8-MHz-wide channels, or “like half of our whole plant,” Nair said. This trend causes MSOs to keep “feeding this beast” with capital just to expand capacity to stay ahead, he said.

“That’s a problem for all of us,” he said. “That’s not sustainable.” And it doesn’t add up with a business that grows revenue at 4% to 5% per year. “Eventually, it breaks,” Nair said. “The math will never work.”

The historic practice of buying specialized devices from traditional suppliers that cost a lot to build and buy won’t work anymore. “That model has to change,” Nair said.

The shift is toward cheap, commodity hardware running on very specialized software.

“So, we’re going to ask our vendors to think about the software and to run it on some cheap hardware because, at the current rate, it’s not sustainable,” he said.

Vendors appear to have gotten that message loud and clear. Last week, Nokia, Casa Systems and Harmonic all announced virtualized versions of Converged Cable Access Platforms that can work in tandem with distributed architectures that move away from traditional monolithic access devices.

Fellow panelist Jim Blackley, executive vice president of engineering and IT at Charter Communications, called Nair’s characterization of the situation “spot on and accurate.”

He added that, when it comes to capital, “you can’t spend it everywhere. … You can’t spend it in the home and spend it in the network and spend it on content and all of the other things we need to deal with.”

It’s also important to think about virtualizing the functions of the consumer premisesequipment (CPE) and move the compute, storage, encryption, and packaging into cloud-based centralized systems, he said.

Charter is moving in that direction with ActiveVideo (a vendor it owns as part of a joint venture with Arris). Virtualizing the CPE means “you can put out devices that will last longer,” Blackley said. “The reality of our business is, the day you [deploy] something, it’s legacy.”

He said Charter is a “huge fan” of network virtualization and separating out the MAC and PHY elements.

Zoran Stakic, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Shaw Communications, said he’s also keying on these trends and listening to partners on “how the future is going to land.”

But when it comes to a move toward virtualization, “the starting point becomes remote PHY,” he said. “The old model is not sustainable. It’s not a choice really, anymore.”

Nair said the migration to software-driven models is one of his top worries. “It requires a skill-set change in all of our businesses,” he said. “The change is not just the skill sets in our employee base, but the skill sets of our vendor base as well.”

Vendors, meanwhile, prefer to innovate on their own platforms. The interests of the two sides might not match up, and that could become a source of tension.

Nair thinks it’s best to solve that problem, “or else you’re going to see more and more operators building their own stuff, and that won’t be very good for the industry.”

The industry is starting to see MSOs exert influence on products and product road maps in other creative ways. Last week, Harmonic joined a growing group of vendors to ink warrant agreements with Comcast that give the MSO an opportunity to buy shares in those suppliers based on product sales and deployment milestones.

The warrants agreement is based on specific sales to Comcast and other “deployment milestones” involving products such as Harmonic’s new CableOS virtual CCAP platform.

Comcast has similar warrants deals with key suppliers such as Arris and Universal Electronics, a key supplier for Comcast’s voice remote for the X1 platform.

FILLING NEED FOR MORE SPEED

The panel also focused on the turn toward Gigabit-level billboard broadband speeds — something that is seemingly morphing into an option cable operators must make available for consumers, whether the vast majority of them actually need it.

Still, Nair doesn’t see 1-Gig going “mainstream” until 2018 or 2019. By that, he means it won’t become a “bullseye” product for Liberty Global that is backed heavily by marketing and promotion. Today, that’s relegated to the operator’s 250-Mbps product, he said.

“We’re looking at increasing it,” Nair said, noting that MSOs have the luxury to press two levers with broadband — price and speed — while competitors with less robust networks can only fiddle with price. “Speed wins.”

Blackley said Charter is already getting positioned for the 1-Gig future. Its all-digital migration is freeing up capacity and Charter is also plunging fiber deeper into the network.

He added, “It’s not just about speeds; it’s about latency, and it’s not just about inhome; it’s out of home.”

Blackley hesitated to say when consumers will actually need 1-Gig speeds, but said he won’t be surprised to see it happen eventually. “Like your garage, if you build it, it will get filled,” he said.

Stakic, meanwhile, warned against “irrational behaviors” occurring in the United States, largely “triggered by Google,” that might cause MSOs to rush prematurely to 1-Gig.

He questioned if adoption rates will be high enough to justify the returns, noting that there aren’t many apps now that require three-digit megabit speeds at this point, let alone 1-Gig.

DOCSIS 3.1: BELIEVE THE HYPE

The DOCSIS 3.1 era is in its early days, but the results so far indicate that the new multi-Gigabit platform for HFC networks is delivering on its promises, particularity when it comes to producing gigabit-class speeds alongside improved bandwidth-efficiency.

All 3.1-based modems have shown they can support a Gigabit-class service, initially in the downstream path, no matter the modulation profile the device is using, Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture at Comcast, explained during a workshop that offered a status report on DOCSIS 3.1’s deployment progress.

As a quick recap, DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to be 50% more bandwidth efficient (from a bits-per-hertz-per-second perspective) than DOCSIS 3.0 via the use of blocks of tiny OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) subcarriers in tandem with an improved forward error correction scheme called Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC).

Comcast now has “hundreds” of customers online with DOCSIS 3.1 in markets such as Nashville, Chicago and Atlanta, where Comcast is conducting advanced market trials-of the technology, he said.

Those initial, solid performance results are important, because DOCSIS 3.1 modems and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) can dynamically tap into multiple “modulation profiles” (up to 4086 QAM) depending on the condition of the spectrum they’re using. The use of OFDM subcarriers for DOCSIS 3.1 enables operators to shift to different modulation profiles depending on the signal-to-noise ratio that’s present in the spectrum.

Operators will be able to set up multiple profiles that can be adjusted “multiple times per day” as new automated tools to manage them enter the market, Salinger said, noting that 3.1 modems are set up for five modulation profiles (four, plus one for testing), while CMTSs can handle 16 modulation profiles per downstream per service group.

Midco has also seen promising results from its early D3.1 trial work in Fargo, N.D., the first of many as the MSO looks to offer gigabit speeds to all subscribers by the end of 2017.

DOCSIS 3.1 “worked well in the lab, it worked well in the field,” Jason Miller, technical marketing engineer at Cisco Systems, which has been working with Midco on the trial, said.

In the Fargo trial, Midco used a 144-MHz block of OFDM combined with eight DOCSIS 3.0 single-carrier QAM channels and produced sustained downstream speeds of about 1.57 Gbps.

Jay Rolls, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Charter Communications and session moderator, wondered if operators would need a legion of gurus to operationalize DOCSIS 3.1, which is still a relatively new technology for the industry.

Salinger stressed that MSOs will need to adjust their operations for DOCSIS 3.1, particularly in areas such as installation and maintenance.

He also acknowledged that setting up multiple modulation profiles is a “daunting task,” noting that it takes time — sometimes a week — to do that by hand, “and we’re good at it.”

However, he said, tools are being created to automate that process on a continual basis, and he expects them to be ready for deployment this quarter.

Further out on the horizon is Full Duplex, a coming annex to DOCSIS 3.1 that will create a “dual use” band that will help cable operators deliver multi-Gigabit symmetrical speeds. Under the current spectrum model, spectrum for the upstream and downstream are split; Full Duplex will allow upstream and downstream traffic to travel in the same block of spectrum.

CableLabs announced that project, called “Full Duplex” (FDX) DOCSIS, in February. If all goes to plan, FDX is poised to become an extension to the DOCSIS 3.1 specs sometime next year, Belal Hamzeh, vice president of wireless technology at CableLabs, said in a recent interview.

There’s an expectation that existing DOCSIS 3.0 bands will not overlap with the FDX band, but those implementations will vary from one operator to another and perhaps even within the same operator, Hamzeh said.

Tom Cloonan, chief technology of network solutions at Arris, said spectrum allocation for an eventual migration to FDX is still an active discussion among MSOs and vendors.

However, a possible deployment scenario could see an MSO set aside a band for the legacy DOCSISupstream (at 5-85 MHz or 5-100 MHz), another band for the legacy downstream (perhaps at 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz), with a band sandwiched in the middle (say, 100 MHz to 700 MHz) that’s dedicated to the FDX operation.

“There might be some variations there, but at a high level, that’s the kind of spectrum some people are talking about,” Cloonan said, noting that FDX could be initially targeted to plant that has already deployed N+0 along with a move to remote/distributed architectures that move the PHY or the MAC and PHY closer to the edge.

Though the specs for FDX are still in f lux, Cloonan said there’s some optimism that the technology could be ready by as early as 2018, but sees 2019 as the year when it sees its true heyday.

“There’s a force-function to make it happen quickly,” he said. “At a very high level, there’s an awful lot of interest in Full-Duplex DOCSIS among the MSO community.”

Cisco Systems is also placing bets on FDX. Last month, Cisco introduced a silicon reference design for Full-Duplex DOCSIS alongside a pledge to contribute the design on a royalty-free basis to the cable industry to accelerate the speed of the technology’s development and eventual deployment.

Nokia, meanwhile, has also been keeping its fingers on the pulse of FDX. It demonstrated a prototype of the concept, calling it “XG-CABLE,” in May at the INTX show in Boston.

Denver On Deck

Cable-Tec Expo 2017 is set to run Oct. 17-20 in Denver, and carry the theme, “The Big Deal,” with a focus on new technologies that can power next-gen services.

SCTE/ISBE has tapped Terry Cordova, executive vice president and chief technology officer of AlticeUSA, and Charter’s Jim Blackley to co-chair the program committee for next year’s show.

SIDEBAR: Werner Calls for Industry Innovation, Collaboration

PHILADELPHIA — Calling 2016 a “foundational year” for the industry, 2017 is poised to be the year of “innovation and collaboration,” Tony Werner, president, technology and product for Comcast Cable, said in opening remarks at the show.

On the foundational side, he noted examples such as the closing of the Charter Communications- Time Warner Cable merger, with Charter now pushing ahead with a cohesive technology and service plan that covers the combined company’s new, broader footprint.

“I think the industry has got a very solid year under [its] belt,” Werner said, pointing to cable’s continued broadband growth, with accelerated rollouts of multi-Gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 technology on the horizon.

2017 is “the year that we can seize as an industry,” added Werner, who last week was re-elected as chairman of the SCTE/ISBE board for the 2016-2017 term. “The wind is at our back as we go into 2017, and I think it’s the time for us to really capitalize as an industry and as a society. … The industry has gotten knocked a few years back that we couldn’t innovate. I think we’re showing everyone that’s not true.”

Reiterating next year’s anticipated theme for MSOs, Werner said the industry’s “secret weapon” is its ability to work together.

“We collaborate, we work across,” he said. “We are not competitors, at present … It allows us to punch above our weight, which I think is so absolutely critical.”

He also presented what he said are key ingredients for the industry’s future success.

Chief among them, again, was collaboration, with Werner giving some credit to X1, Comcast’s cloud-based platform, which relies on agile and DevOps models, attracting top engineering talent and creating a culture and environment “where people like to show up and work…and build great products on top of powerful platforms.”

And Comcast is collaborating outside of its ecosystem, Werner reminded the crowd, pointing to syndication deals it has with Cox Communications and Shaw Communications.

“The collaboration back and forth [with those partners] is powerful,” Werner said.

— Jeff Baumgartner

SIDEBAR: Energy2020 in ‘Show Me the Money’ Phase

PHILADELPHIA — The Energy2020 community met on Tuesday at Cable- Tec Expo for its third annual progress report, saying that in “show me the money” terms, the initiative is working. But with only three years or so until the “2020” part of Energy2020, there’s still a ton to do.

“What the SCTE has done with Energy2020 is extremely critical,” said Balan Nair, CTO of Liberty Global and a co-founder of the program. “If we can hit the goals stated, it will make a huge difference — to us, to our management teams, to our customers.”

The initiative’s four stated goals: To reduce power consumption by 20% (on a per unit basis), cut energy costs by 25% (also on a per unit basis), optimize tech facilities and data centers by 20%, and reduce grid dependency by 10%. All of that, by 2020.

“We’re the engineers … and like any good engineer, you don’t build something for waste,” Nair said.

So far, the savings are small, but poised to grow. Dan Cooper, chair of the SCTE’s Sustainability Management Subcommittee, noted $12.5 million in energy savings since last year, ”which, compared to what we all spend on energy, isn’t a big number, but it’s a start.”

Cooper highlighted two new Charter-initiated efforts since the last E2020 update, both solar: A partnership with two utility companies in upstate New York to provide 12 Megawatts of renewable energy, estimated to save $5-plus million over the life of the project, and a new national data center in Charlotte, N.C., where the use of solar energy will offset 10% of annual energy costs.

“The key is that it’s not always capital intensive to move the bar” on energy efficiency, he said.

Sam Khola, senior manager of sustainability for Liberty Global, and the recipient of this year’s Energy2020 award, noted that energy costs are “already colossal, and they’re not staying level — year over year, they grow.” That’s what prompted Liberty’s work with Phase Changing Materials (PCMs) — a sort of thermal battery that works by capturing and storing a structure’s heat (in this case, hub sites) during the day, then discharging it at night.

“When we talked here last year, it was a tiny implementation in one of the 14 countries we serve,” Khola said. But after Liberty saw a 33% reduction in TCO, and a 43% improvement in energy efficiency, an expansion plan was evident. “The plan is to expand both geographically [beyond the Netherlands, to Ireland and the U.K.], and technologically,” Khola said.

Comcast, which typically experiences 4% growth in annual energy costs, kicked off an overhaul of its utility bill management and energy procurement processes, said Daniel Marut, director of national sustainability. “With over 200,000 utility accounts, it can be a little overwhelming for an accounts payable team, whose role is to pay the bill,” he said.

That’s what prompted a systematic way of auditing outside plant, to get an accurate count of power supplies, to start. “The idea is to systemically eliminate costs that are incurred by just basic mistakes in utility bill processing,” Marut said.

— Leslie Ellis

Get complete coverage of Cable-Tec Expo 2016

Philadelphia -- While 2016 is a “foundational year” for the industry, 2017 is poised to be the year of “innovation and collaboration,” Tony Werner, president, technology and product for Comcast Cable, said here Tuesday morning in remarks that opened this year’s Cable-Tec Expo. 

On the foundational side, he noted examples such as the closing of the Charter Communications-Time Warner Cable merger, with Charter now pushing ahead with a cohesive technology and service plan that covers the combined company’s new, broader footprint.

“I think the industry has got a very solid year under [its] belt,” Werner said, pointing to cable’s continued broadband growth, with accelerated rollouts of multi-gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 technology on the horizon.

2017, he said, is “the year that we can seize as an industry,” added Werner, who this week was re-elected as chairman of the SCTE/ISBE board for the 2016-2017 term. “The wind is at our back as we go into 2017, and I think it's the time for us to really capitalize as an industry and as a Society…The industry has gotten knocked a few years back that we couldn't innovate,” he said. “I think we’re showing everyone that’s not true.”

Reiterating next year’s anticipated theme for MSOs, Werner said the industry’s “secret weapon” is its ability to work together.

“We collaborate, we work across,” he said. “We are not competitors, at present…It allows us to punch above our weight, which I think is so absolutely critical.”

He also presented what he said are key ingredients for the industry’s future success.

Chief among them, again, was collaboration, with Werner giving some credit to X1, Comcast’s  cloud-based platform, which relies on agile and DevOps models, attracting top engineering talent, and creating a culture and environment “where people like to show up and work…and build great products on top of powerful platforms.”

And Comcast, Werner reminded the crowd, is collaborating outside of Comcast’s ecosystem, pointing to syndication deals it has with Cox Communications and Shaw Communications.

“The collaboration back and forth [with those partners] is powerful,” Werner said.

More on those opening remarks, including Werner’s follow up conversation with Zoran Stakic, Shaw’s EVP and CTO, will be featured in the Day 2 daily from Multichannel News that will be distributed here Wednesday. 

Related:Comcast Leans Into Wireless

Some big, perhaps surprising, changes are occurring in Comcast’s technology and engineering ranks, led by the coming transition of company executive vice president and chief network officer John Schanz.

He’s taking an advisory role at Atairos, the investment vehicle set up by former Comcast vice chairman and CFO Michael Angelakis last year, which has invested $250 million in e-commerce company GroupOn.

Schanz, a former AOL networking executive who joined Comcast in 2006, has been helming the largest video and broadband network in the pay TV industry, serving 22 million cable customers, 23 million high-speed Internet customers and 11 million voice customers. Under his leadership, Comcast has developed a major content delivery network that underpins a multiscreen video platform for smartphones, tablets and PCs, as well as traditional set-top boxes.

Former Comcast CTO Tony Werner, recently promoted to president, technology and product, will assume Schanz’s responsibilities on the network side. MSO veteran Sree Kotay has succeeded Werner as CTO.

Marcien Jenckes, EVP of consumer services, is taking on Schanz’s duties in ad-technology operations, which includes the recently acquired programmatic ad systems vendor Visible World and online ad specialist FreeWheel.

Comcast Cable announced two big moves at the top of its technology personnel chain, promoting Tony Werner to president, technology and product, and Sree Kotay to chief technology officer.

Comcast said Werner, most recently EVP and CTO, will continue to oversee all aspects of the MSO’s technology and product organization, including innovation, development and operations. That team  leads the design and development of Comcast’s customer-facing products, including X1, second-screen apps, and home broadband and WiFi. That organization also leads software development, systems engineering, next-generation access networks, cloud computing, technical operations and R&D within Comcast. Werner joined Comcast in December 2006.

“Tony is a visionary innovator, and has been a leading champion of technological evolution at Comcast,” Neil Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, said in a statement. “His team of engineers, developers and software architects create products and experiences that have redefined how consumers experience television and the Internet.”

Kotay joined Comcast in 2007 as chief software architect, where he headed up software strategy, including the development of software and apps for X1 and other key products. In his expanded role, Kotay will lead Comcast’s software and technology strategy, particularly as it relates to new customer-facing products and services, including advanced video and Internet. Kotay will also oversee Comcast Innovation Labs, the company’s advanced research and development group, and helm the integration of quality engineering into all aspects of product development.

“Sree has driven the evolution of Comcast from software consumer to software creator,” Smit added. “Under his leadership, our software engineering team has evolved to become smarter, faster and more efficient. I can think of no better partner with whom to execute Comcast’s technology vision.”

New Orleans — More than any single force shaping the television and broadband industry, technology is driving the biggest change.

Engineers and executives steeped in hardware and software acronyms, domestic and international, picked apart the biggest challenges faced by the industry, spanning mobile, multi-gigabit broadband, the IP video transition and a host of others, at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans last week.

Waxing Wireless

While U.S. cable operators are leaning heavily on WiFi to lead their wireless strategies, Liberty Global has also been pushing hard on quad-play offerings that tie in the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) model.

Mobile “is becoming the primary computing device,” Balan Nair, the MSO’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, said during a presentation about technology trends and how the operator is handling new forms of competition.

Liberty Global now has about 4.5 million mobile subscribers through its MVNO relationships (that subscriber number is expected to grow to 8 million through the MSO’s M&A activity). Nair said Long Term Evolution (LTE) allows for seamless connectivity, and the technology is on the road to delivering gigabit capacities.

“LTE is here to stay,” Nair said.

But WiFi “is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our story going forward,” he said, noting that delivering a good WiFi experience in the home matters more to many consumers than the wired broadband pipe connecting the home itself.

Nair also shed some light on Liberty Global’s future plans, telling the crowd the MSO is working on its first “WiFi-first” device, which would prefer WiFi access when it’s available and seamlessly fall back to the LTE mobile network when it’s not.

Enabling that seamless transition “is not an easy thing to do,” Nair allowed, adding that Liberty Global expects to introduce the WiFi-first product toward the fourth quarter of 2016.

During the follow-up panel moderated by Cox Communications president Pat Esser, Nair outlined four ways cable operators can enter the mobile game — they can build and operate the network themselves (if they have spectrum); buy another mobile provider; launch a “lite” MVNO whereby the MSO is relegated as a reseller; or introduce a “full” MVNO play where the operator builds out the mobile “core,” keeps call control and essentially rents access to the radios and base stations.

Liberty Global has tried out all four, and Nair was direct about the issues cable operators face with the home-grown route.

“I’ll tell you, building sucks,” he said. Though Liberty Global was able to obtain spectrum relatively cheaply, the MSO shut down its home-grown network about 18 months after launching it.

He said Liberty Global has found the most success, from an operational and economic standpoint, with the full MVNO approach, which allows the operator to control the SIM card that goes in the smartphone.

“In the end, it’s about handsets and price,” he said, noting that he puts the lite MVNO on the “bottom of the list” because the operator has no control — it’s just about renting and selling.

Nair also talked up the positive effect quad-play bundles have on customer retention.

“Over time, the churn rate is discernable between a quad-play and a non quad-play,” he said. “There’s a downside, though. If you screw up with mobile, you lose all four — you lose the whole quad-play.”

Service Agility, IP Video, Cybersecurity

The technology chiefs jumped to other topics during Wednesday’s conversation, including service agility, customer-centricity, the all-IP progression and cybersecurity.

Comcast, fresh off the national rollout of its voice remote, will launch an add-on called “X1 Answers” in mid-November, MSO executive vice president and CTO Tony Werner said.

“You’ll be able to ask, ‘What was the Broncos score?’ ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ I think it’s going to change a lot of things,” he said.

The transition to all-IP is foundational to proactive change, Werner and others said. By this time next year, Comcast will have deployed 8 million pure- IP set-tops, which matters to serving video on second screens.

“We have the same number of baby boomers as millennials right now, and the millennials are watching a lot more content on mobile,” Werner said. “If we have 24 million customer relationships and 15 million video starts in a week [on mobile devices] — that’s exponential, and it will probably only continue to grow. If you don’t have video over IP, you’re going to miss a big part of the audience — and it’s a growing part, not a shrinking part.”

Rolling out more features and services more quickly is a big priority for all network operators, execs said.

Liberty Global, which is deploying only Reference Design Kit-based devices and will begin converting to HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec) for 4K/Ultra HD video next year, will get to service agility using defined and publishable APIs (Application Program Interfaces), Nair said.

“I just want to build a stack that has almost every functionality covered by APIs — it’s a big transition for us,” Nair said.

For Nomi Bergman, president of Bright House Networks, the near-term product future includes more 10-Gigabit EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network), with an eye toward 100-G EPON. “We’re now helping to create the standard for that,” she said.” Also hot in BHN markets: Its “Echo”-branded whole-home WiFi solution.

“It represents a really nice collaboration between the technology, product and marketing teams,” she said.

On the heels of Tuesday’s Cybersecurity Symposium, Nair described a massive hack in the Netherlands, where 2 million broadband connections were shut down, two nights in a row. The four perpetrators were arrested a couple of weeks ago, and the incident caused Liberty to overhaul its crisis handling mechanisms.

“In dealing with communications, law enforcement, regulatory, PR — as it turned out, what we had wasn’t the most easily translatable during a crisis. We had to rebuild a lot of our processes,” Nair said.

Panelists were also asked to discuss some things they’re working on today. Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs, said his thinking tends to gravitate to what’s coming tomorrow, noting that his group has been focused on “exponential technologies” — things that are outside the scope of the traditional planning cycle.

He said he worries about “what’s beyond the horizon … so that we don’t get surprised.”

Read more news from SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

New Orleans -- The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) on Tuesday announced that Tony Werner, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Comcast, has been elected chairman of the organization’s board for the 2015-2016 term.

Werner (pictured) succeeds Terry Cordova, executive vice president and CTO of Suddenlink Communications, who served as chairman of SCTE (and its global brand, the International Society of Broadband Experts) for two terms.

Here at a meeting that coincided with the show, the board also elected three new officers to serve on the executive committee for the coming year: 

-Vice Chairman: Bill Warga, vice president, technology, Liberty Global;

-Treasurer: Christine Whitaker, senior vice president, operations, Comcast; and

-Secretary: Steve Williams, director, access network planning, design and operations, Time Warner Cable.

Following the election, the SCTE board of directors conducted its first meeting with the new board.

“Terry Cordova has provided the tireless commitment and the leadership we’ve needed as we’ve transformed SCTE and ISBE into world-class resources for the global cable telecommunications industry,” Mark Dzuban president and CEO of SCTE, said in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Tony Werner, his Executive Committee and the entire Board of Directors as we continue to enhance the value of SCTE and ISBE for our operator, vendor and individual members.”

In these days of hyper-competition on all fronts of the multichannel-TV industry, technology truly rules. Bigger broadband, better video, more mobility and continuous improvement are key. Only the strong will survive. Ahead of the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology analyst Leslie Ellis checked in with three top chief technology officers — Cox Communications’s Kevin Hart, Liberty Global’s Balan Nair and Comcast’s Tony Werner — on such timely topics as industry consolidation, capacity expansion and what it takes to move at “Web speed,” like cable’s new over-the-top competitors. They also drilled into chewy tech trends like wireless and LTE-Unlicensed, the “Gigabuzz-o-rama,” the Reference Design Kit (RDK) and, of course, DOCSIS 3.1. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: Merger-itaville! Consolidation is happening in a very big way this year. To what extent is it impacting your technical and engineering life/work?

Kevin Hart: Navigating the shifting waters around our vendor-supplier ecosystems — that probably has me thinking a little longer. In the short term, there can be implications: Perhaps they lose focus on product support or on backing up programs that are in place. As we continue to say, Cox is not for sale. But there are definite implications on how we think and operate. You’ll see additional partnering opportunities that we’ll pursue to leverage scale from a product standpoint.

Balan Nair: Scale is important in our business. We need it to be competitive; it brings great opportunities in our ability to do big things. Remember, we’re up against companies with global reach, with much larger balance sheets. Innovation and keeping up in product development and consumer behavioral changes are getting more complicated and more capital-intensive.

MCN: A lot of good stuff is happening behind the scenes these days that’s all about finding and fixing problems before they reach customers. What’s your favorite customer-care tool these days?

KH: We have multiple roadmaps around this. One example is a tool where we’ve leveraged Agile [methodologies] — Home View. It’s an internal tool, currently, that lets us see the performance and QoS [quality of service] of set-top boxes, modems and end devices within the home. From that, we can provide better self-care by feeding some aspects of the internal Home View app into [subscribers’] “My Account” view, or enable a proactive reset, or a fine-tune or software upgrades. We’re starting to deploy it. It will really help us to improve the user experience and mitigate both calls and truck rolls.

BN: I’m with Kevin.

Tony Werner: We’ve made transforming the customer experience a focus throughout the company, so it would be impossible to briefly summarize everything we’re doing. That said, I’m really excited about the continued evolution of our “My Account” app, which gives our customers pinpoint control over their accounts, and greatly reduces the need for calls and even service visits. What’s great about the app is that it’s an app — and like any app, we can continually update and expand it. One of the features we recently debuted, and are launching nationwide in the next few months, is our Tech ETA feature. It lets people see where their service technician is, en route, on an interactive map — similar to what folks have come to expect with online car services.

MCN: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon — they’re all companies that grew up on broadband, and as such are natively “agile” and “DevOps.” What’s the status of those Web-side development concepts in your organizations?

BN: Yes, we have to work faster. Unquestionably, DevOps and all the other related buzzwords are important and happening.

TW: Agile and DevOps are both very real to us, and really form the foundation of the innovative product development model we’ve adopted over the past five years. We work those development concepts every day, whether in the form of fast-paced product-development “sprints” or cross-functional tiger teams that bring together design, engineering and product experts in lean, fast-moving leadership groups. I think our commitment to those development principles stands with the very best of Silicon Valley, and is evidenced in a product like [cloud-based video platform] X1, which is updated at Web speed and frequency in a way that delivers new products and services. Xfinity Games and Xfinity Share are just two that we unveiled this past calendar year.

KH: We too have really leaned in on those particular practices to put them into operation over the last year and a half. We’ve rolled out the agile methodology, and we’re seeing great returns. Our “target state” website, which is the internal name of our e-commerce program — that’s agile. Sprint after sprint, we’re adding new capabilities, based on real customer feedback.

As for DevOps, earlier this year I moved to an integrated organizational structure around DevOps, and combining Tier 1 and Tier 2 [resources]. For video, voice and high-speed data, I co-located the development and operations teams around those platforms, with one, single end-to-end owner.

MCN: Was it painful?

KH: To be honest, I was concerned about the organization’s ability to adapt to the new model. So I was pleasantly surprised to see how pleased our people have been. The co-location, the structure, the tools — every one wants to deliver better services. That’s the goal, and we’re doing that. But to your point, some of the tools and techniques to integrate DevOps into the daily norm are still coming along.

BN: But it will be more painful to ignore this shift!

MCN: What does it take to be technologically competitive in these times?

KH: Great question. I’ve been here four and a half years or so. The rate of change within the MSO space, from a technology perspective, is now on par with the technological competitive landscape. It wasn’t always that way. We’re now competing against some of the largest technology players on the face of the Earth. We need to continuously improve our feedback loops, evaluate trends and architect platforms. And we have to do that in tight sync with our chief marketing and chief product officers and their teams.

TW: First and foremost, it requires a will to innovate, which in turn requires a willingness to disrupt your own processes and preconceptions. A product like X1 exists because a small team here started with a basic premise — “We can make this better.” It’s an ethos that I’m committed to cultivating throughout our product-development process. When you start from a position of wanting to constantly improve and build better mousetraps, the rest is just effort and execution.

BN: It takes amazing luck, forecasting of technology trends, understanding what Apple and Google are doing — and being able to predict what they are going to do. And allocating resources to the right projects. And on and on!

MCN: On to some nitty-gritty tech issues. WiFi and LTE-U/LAA: It has the potential to seriously disrupt WiFi connectivity. On a scale of 1-10 — where 1 is, “Relax, everything’s going to be OK,” and 10 is “battle stations, brace for impact!” — where are you?

KH: Up until recently, I was closer to the 8-9 range, because of the uncertainties about how the process is unfolding. Now, I’m trending toward a 6 or 7. We’re hanging our hat on LAA [Licensed Assisted Access], the international standard. We think it’s more WiFi-friendly. There are also some tailwinds around [Qualcomm’s] muLTEfire [wireless-broadband] approach. It’s more equal — it enables us to have a bit more of a level playing field, as it relates to the control plane of the unlicensed band.

BN: I give it a 5 — it’s as much an opportunity as it is a disruption. LTE-U is going to happen. We have to figure ways to make it effective for us. It’s in the unlicensed band, so we can participate in it as well. The control plane should be in the unlicensed band, too.

MCN: One day, CableLabs tests cite a definite and deleterious impact of LTE-U on WiFi; the next day, other tests indicate no impact. What are the indicators of truth?

BN: Anytime you have different PHYs [physical layers] operating in the same spectrum, it can be a problem. CableLabs is doing a great job for us, to move it from “problem” to “opportunity.”

KH: I also think there’s a definite correlation involving the physical distance between the WiFi access point and the LTE tower. At 300 meters or so, there’s little impact on throughput. At 20 meters, you can have almost a 100% reduction in the output. So a lot of it is correlated to distance, but the standards will help.

MCN: IP video: Where are you with it, and when will your networks be “all-IP?”

BN: Our strategy is to first move the user interface, then VOD, then linear, to IP. The UI and VOD shifts are in full swing. Linear has started with our Horizon Go service, but not yet to legacy set-tops. We’ll probably start down that path in 2017.

TW: We’ve spent significant time and resources on this. Great progress so far. That said, our industry still has a good deal of work ahead before we realize the all-IP video future. Ingesting all of the assets and local channel lineups is a small part of the overall effort. Operationalizing, building all of the tools, implementing alternate content switching — it’ll take some time.

KH: All of our video distribution to second screens is IP-enabled, as is all of our VOD ecosystem. We’re about to complete the first year of a two-year plan to go all-digital. That’ll free up enough spectrum to enable our [DOCSIS] 3.1 plans. When that’s complete, at the end of ’16, we’ll follow our IP roadmap. It’ll likely take us three-plus years before we’re all-IP, but we’re on our way.

MCN: What’s the faster and more efficient way to sustainable bandwidth and capacity: DOCSIS 3.1, or fiber-deep and PON [Passive Optical Network]?

TW: Hands down, DOCSIS 3.1. With 3.1, we’re backward-compatible. Devices can be self-installed. No backhoes. Any network improvements we make in addition to DOCSIS 3.1 will only serve to enhance its capacity to deliver superfast Internet to our customers.

BN: Agree. DOCSIS 3.1 is the most efficient way; that’s a no brainer. Taking fiber deeper is definitely an option for rebuilds and upgrades. Fiber to the home [FTTH] makes sense for most new builds. Depending on the situation, we have many tools in our tool bag. D3.1 is the most cost-efficient.

KH: With our “G1GABLAST” product, which we launched about a year ago, we’ve been extending fiber deeper — all the way to the home or [multiple dwelling unit]. We’ve had pretty good success around that. It’ll still be a hybrid of both technologies [DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber-deep].

MCN: What’s the state of the state of DOCSIS 3.1? How and when does it “go to market?”

KH: What we’re hearing throughout the ecosystem is very encouraging, in terms of the speeds, spectral efficiencies, backward-compatibility to DOCSIS 3.0 and overall interoperability. I think you’ll start to see market trials and production networks in ’16. We’ll probably be late ’16 or early ’17, as we finalize the all-digital spectrum reclamation. DOCSIS 3.1 will be a key tool in the toolkit to enable Gigabit services in our broader footprint — it has a very long life ahead of it.

BN: We’re already deploying CCAP [Converged Cable Access Platform] with D3.1 capability on both the downstream and the upstream signal directions. We’ll issue a request for proposals on consumer premises equipment [CPE] later this year, with selections early next year. Deployment will be end of 2016, early 2017, depending on how long it takes to certify and trial the new devices with a new chipset.

MCN: Will it evolve like the prior versions of DOCSIS — modems and gateways first, then headend gear and CMTS [cable modem termination system]?

KH: Yes, I think that’s the expected sequence of events. I think the CPE in general is a little behind the curve, but over the next few months you’ll see changes there.

BN: Ditto.

MCN: Gigabit services: All the rage! And then there’s the reality of it: The fastest tiers are invariably the lowest subscribed. Is it a necessity or a red herring?

BN: You know, there’s lots of smoke and mirrors with Gigabit services. Our bull’s-eye product offering now is 150 Megabits per second. That’s plenty competitive, and it’s doing quite well. Gigabit is still a niche product, but I think it’ll be mainstream in about three years — mainstream for us, anyway. Our cost to get to Gigabit will be an order of magnitude less than a telco deployment, on a cost-per-passing basis.

KH: We rolled out our G1GABLAST service about a year ago, so we’re slightly ahead of the curve on that one. We’ve had a good take rate where it’s available, but not everybody needs a Gig today. As we evolve it, it will continue to gain traction. More importantly, we doubled our speeds this year on our most popular tiers, across our entire footprint. Our focus is trying to make sure we’re delivering high-quality speed, with minimized constraints, to the majority of our footprint.

MCN: What should this audience know about speed vs. throughput? KH: Speed is one thing. Concurrency of devices is another. It’s a function of the weakest link in the chain. If the WiFi router or gateway isn’t 802.11ac, speeds are going to drop — even if there’s a Gig coming into the house.

TW: Very few things need a burst rate of more than 4 to 10 Mbps, but multiple devices at low speeds do accumulate to higher traffic. We’re always engineering our networks for both burst rate and throughput. Ultimately, all of the attention around Gigabit is a very good thing for the industry and for consumers, because it drives us all to stay well ahead of the curve as we engineer the access networks of tomorrow.

MCN: The upstream path: To widen, or not to widen? If widen — when, how much and how?

BN: Upstream is important, but not as important as downstream. We are mostly a society of consumers, not publishers. So far, anyway.

KH: I think the reality of applications and the leveraging of the cloud are just putting more pressure on the upstream. We’ve seen a couple percentage points of upstream growth, year over year. Bonded channels are an option; moving the upper boundary of the upstream [from 42 MHz] is also an option. There are definitely some levers for us to pull, particularly as we take fiber deeper.

TW: The nice thing about DOCSIS 3.1 is that it allows for a higher [spectrum] split, all the way up to 204 MHz. I think we will take advantage of this in certain places. I don’t think it is absolutely required, but we have the tools.

MCN: To what extent is the RDK a part of your or your company’s day-to-day technology work?

KH: Tony and Balan are farther down the RDK path. As we leverage the X1 platform to be the user interface of our Contour 2 app, we’re moving to RDK as a part of our home architecture system. So we’ll be doing more with RDK in the future, with our video products. Also, as we continue to improve our in-home WiFi presence, we’ll be looking at RDK-B for our in-home gateway and architectural designs.

TW: I think the same advantages that we have obtained in RDK-V [for video] will be evident in RDK-B — meaning the power of a community, and the significantly faster time-to-market for new technology, and the faster release of features. Same story for both.

BN: I challenge all the other cable companies to really adopt this. RDK-V and RDK-B [broadband] are a big part of our future development. We need scale in our collective development — that way, we can drive some amazing things, together, with a common underlying stack. RDK has all of the relevant checkboxes: Open source, cloud, scale, embedded in most chips, expertise in our development community, vendor support — it leaves no reason to want to go do your own thing.

MCN: Anything in particular you’re on the lookout for at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo?

KH: I’m looking forward to seeing some of the great advances in energy conservation and disaster recovery. Cox is making several good advances in both categories, and we’ll have a few demos onsite in New Orleans. Tell your readers to check it out.

BN: Agree again with Kevin, sans the demos. As the co-chair of the Energy2020 program, I can attest — it’s big, it matters, and everybody should know more about it.

TW: Distributed access architecture — products and technologies.

DOCSIS 3.1 is getting ready for its close-up, and Comcast likes what it’s seeing so far.

The deployment era for DOCSIS 3.1 isn’t expected to get underway until sometime next year, but one of the operator’s top execs said the emerging multi-Gigabit platform is already performing as advertised during the early trial phases. In some ways, the technology is already beating expectations before it has even been given the official CableLabs stamp.

“We’re validating things that we had as assumptions,” Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, said of the trials, which don’t yet involve paying customers. “I am probably more enthused by what I’ve seen so far than what I thought I would be.”

Expect more of that kind of enthusiasm at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans, which will offer several sessions and workshops on the emerging DOCSIS 3.1 platform. Vendors, meanwhile, are expected to trot out demos of their DOCSIS 3.1-based network gear and consumer premises equipment.

Among the assumptions Comcast is evaluating are whether cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) can be upgraded to D3.1 via software, and how ODFM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) traffic behaves on the access network.

To achieve spectrum utilization that is about 50% more efficient than the 6-MHz-wide channel used in DOCSIS 3.0, DOCSIS 3.1 is using blocks of OFDM and a new forward error-correction scheme called Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) that will take the place of the current Reed-Solomon approach.

Werner said he is also encouraged that DOCSIS 3.1 will enable Comcast to use 4096-QAM modulation, particularly in the downstream, which will enable the MSO to deliver more bits per hertz than what it is getting today with 256 QAM and DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS 3.1 is also expected to enable Comcast and other MSOs to use a variety of modulation profiles.

Comcast isn’t detailing how many D3.1 trials are presently active, but Werner said enough are underway to give it a means of analyzing how the technology is operating on a cross-section of plant and service areas.

As for deployments of DOCSIS 3.1, Werner said to expect Comcast to make some initial headway in 2016 and “lots of progress” in 2017.

Look for more on Comcast’s early work with DOCSIS 3.1 technology in one of the Multichannel News show dailies at Cable-Tec Expo. Visit our 2015 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo microsite for more show-related news.

CHICAGO -- While everyone seems to be fixated on residential broadband speeds the pump out 1 Gigabit per second or more, cable operators and other broadband ISPs must also continue to focus on improving the overall user experience as consumers connect in and outside the home.

That was a prevailing view here Tuesday afternoon during a technology session focused on innovation and the future of media.

The network is already doing a good job of meeting the needs of most consumers, but “the network has got to be smarter,” said David Dibble, the former Yahoo exec who was named CTO of Cablevision Systems last fall. “It’s not just a series of dumb pipes.”

By “smarter,” Dibble meant using things like telemetry  data and other forms of information that can keep tabs on the user experience, and in some cases, make the network itself a self-managed entity.

Tony Werner, the executive vice president and CTO of Comcast, agreed that an important goal is to manage that experience on the wired network to the home and when consumers access the Internet via WiFi. On that point, he said 60% of devices in the home aren’t wired and will only grow.

“I do very much believe that the home will go 100% wireless inside” within 12 to 18 months,  he said, noting later that MSOs should strive to make WiFi “bone-dead simple” for the consumer.

However, “you’ll still need a fairly robust [wired] network” underpinning it, Werner added.

While speed doesn’t tell the full consumer story for broadband, “speed is a good place to start,” Kevin Hart, EVP and CTO of Cox Communications said, noting that the MSO has been expanding the deployment of its new 1-Gig “G!GABLAST” residential service. “Speed is a key metric and something the consumer can relate to.”

But latency for gaming and other real-time apps and service reliability are also key metrics that the industry should also continue to pursue and maybe “put branding around.”

Still, 1-Gig is the new billboard speed that cable operators and other ISPs are chasing, even if the use-case isn’t obviously apparent to most broadband users.

But the consumer demand for 1-Gig will grow as people use broadband to consume video on an increasing number of IP-connected devices at once, leverage cloud-based services and apps, and tap broadband to manage and monitor more elements of their homes and lives.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about the Internet of Everything,” Yvette Kanouff, SVP and general manager of Cisco’s service provider video software and solutions group,  said.

Werner agreed that consumer demand for 1-Gig won’t revolve around a solitary, but an accumulation of them, but believes that it will be a long time before that capacity is fully utilized.

“I still think a Gigabit is overkill for some time,” Werner said.

Jeremy Legg, the head of technology and strategy and product monetization at Turner Broadcasting System, noted that beefier broadband can also help programmers develop “smarter content.”

For TV Everywhere apps like CNNGo, Turner is already annotating content as it’s produced live, paving the way for a future in which consumers can essentially “multicast” a feed of CNN tailored for a viewer’s particular  interests.

On the point of smarter content, Werner noted that Comcast is developing an “enhanced content” feature for the MSO’s X1 video platform that will enable programmers to add additional content that can be layered on top of the video feed.

“We very much want the content folks to be on our platform,” Werner said. 

Chief technology officers from Comcast and Liberty Global were among those cheering the closure of Intel’s acquisition of Lantiq, a maker of broadband access and home networking silicon.

Intel, which makes chipsets for cable set-tops and gateways as well as DOCSIS modems, announced the deal in February, noting that it will help it broaden its play into the “Internet of Things” and provide a boost to “smart routers” for the connected home.

“This acquisition enables us to extend our success in cable home gateways into DSL and fiber markets giving us full coverage of broadband access methods around the world,” Intel’s Gregory Bryant explained in this blog post. “The teams are already developing innovative ways to use our combined IP to create new products to benefit our customers, which we’ll share more about in the coming months.”

Dan Artusi, Lantiq’s CEO, now reports to Bryant -- the corporate vice president in Intel's Client Computing Group, and GM of desktop client platforms -- and lead Intel’s new Connected Home Division.

MSOs that work closely with Intel weighed in on the deal.

“We’re pleased to see Intel growing their gateway business with the purchase of Lantiq," Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and CTO, said in a statement. “As Comcast continues to scale our networks to gigabit speeds, we look forward to having the benefit of a common architecture across multiple access technologies that shortens development time so we can quickly deliver ultra-fast broadband experiences to our customers.” 

“We’re glad to see Intel expanding their portfolio of technologies with the Lantiq acquisition,” added Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global. “The combined group will be a leading supplier for broadband technologies with a comprehensive range of solutions to help us deliver ever faster connectivity to our customers.”

Arris, which makes devices that rely on Intel silicon, said the combo will bring benefits to its connected home platforms, Charles Cheever, Arris’s consumer premises equipment CTO, said.

When the deal was announced, Intel said more than 100 operators worldwide had deployed products powered by Lantiq, which has been focusing on DSL technology, including G.fast,  an emerging standard designed to bring 1-Gig capabilities to DSL. 

A concentration on new cutting-edge cable technologies, an increased focus on education and the debut of several cable new exhibitors helped drive attendance at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers 2014 Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

The annual technology fest, held from Sept.22-25, attracted about 9,100 attendees, the SCTE said in a statement. While that was below the 9,800 attendees to the 2013 gathering in Atlanta, a 22% increase in new exhibitors helped drive total booth takers to 376 and a pre-conference symposium on DOCSIS 3.1 and wireless technologies drew more than 500 attendees for the first time. Both the exhibitor and attendance totals represent increases over those registered in 2009, when Denver last played host to the event.

This year’s get-together also had a new focus on learning and education – the conference agenda included more than 100 hours of workshops and symposiums on three distinct tracks: Next-Generation Customer Experience; Next-Generation Video; and Next-Generation Networks.  A standing-room only crowd heard Comcast executive vice president and chief network officer John Schanz keynote the Energy 2020 session that unveiled cable’s plan to reduce energy consumption and assure energy availability by the end of the decade. The event also saw strong attendance at back-to-back sessions on DevOps, Agile Software Development and RDK.

Cable executives provided insights at the general sessions into how the industry is adapting to continue to improve the customer experience and maintain its competitive edge worldwide, and how engineering and operations professional can align their careers.  The sessions included opening remarks by Tony Werner, executive vice president and CTO of Comcast Cable Communications and the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo Program Chair; a keynote presentation by Rob Lloyd, president, development and sales for Cisco Systems, Inc.; a panel on cloud technologies; a Werner conversation with Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global; and views on career growth from Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Video Software and Solutions Group, Cisco, and Mike LaJoie, executive vice president and CTO and chief network operations officer for Time Warner Cable.

“Despite unavoidable proximity to IBC and other industry events, the cable engineering community turned out in force to learn more about harnessing the new technologies that increase and ensure service availability,” said SCTE president and CEO Mark Dzuban in a statement.  “We’re grateful for the leadership of Tony Werner; the insights of Mike Fries, Rob Lloyd and our other speakers; the support of CableLabs at our DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless symposium; and the technical resources of Comcast’s Denver Central operations. All of them—and many others—contributed to making SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014 the most successful educational event in our history.”

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2015 will be conducted Tuesday through Friday, Oct. 13-16 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Liberty Global executive vice president and CTO Balan Nair will serve as Program Committee chairman for the 2015 event.

DENVER -- SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- Liberty Global faces different competitive pressures in Europe and other parts of the world than some of its U.S. MSO peers, but the need to achieve scale across the board is critical for the entire cable industry, Mike Fries, Liberty Global’s president and CEO, said here during Wednesday’s opening general session.

The need for scale has “never been more important than right now, and will only become more important,” Fries said during a keynote discussion with Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, and the program chairman for this year’s show.

One area where Liberty Global and other MSOs can achieve scale is at the set-top box, and particularly around the Reference Design Kit (RDK), the preintegrated software stack for IP-capable devices that’s being managed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global.

“The RDK is a DOCSIS moment, in our view,” Fries said, referencing the CableLabs-driven DOCSIS specs that has helped cable to achieve massive scale on the broadband end of the business. Liberty Global, by the way, is basing the next-generation of its Horizon video platform on the RDK.

“Horizon, for us, is a game-changer,” he said. On the set-top end, Liberty Global, Fries said, launched an “e-auction” on Wednesday that aims to produce devices that are cheaper and lighter than today’s products and to take advantage of the migration of services to the proverbial cloud.

Fries said scale is also key as cable faces off with “hyper-giants” like Google and Netflix, which is aggressively expanding its subscription video streaming services across many regions of Europe.

Fries also reiterated his stance that the rise of Netflix has prodded the cable industry to move faster and embrace over-the-top video services.

“Netflix taught us a great lesson,” Fries said, noting that cable already had the connectivity and the content. “All we were missing was the app…the user experience.”

To match up, Liberty Global has launched its own over-the-top subscription video service, called My Prime. “We might launch a YouTube channel,” Fries said.

Expanded coverage of Fries' keynote, including his sizing up of the competitive landscape and Liberty Global's wireless and mobile strategies, will be featured in Thursday's Multichannel News SCTE Cable-Tec Expo show daily. For more Expo news and announcements, please visit our show micro-site.