16 Cable Industry Terms You Need to Know to Get Ready for Cable-Tec 2019

SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo 2019 is just around the corner (September 30th-October 3rd in New Orleans). Plan on a busy week given the wide range of technology on display in the exhibit hall, the 115 papers being presented in the Fall Technical Forum, numerous panel discussions on the Innovation Stage, keynote presentations during the opening General Session and annual awards luncheon, and so much more. If you’re a newcomer to the industry (or new to Cable-Tec Expo), you may find some of the jargon at the conference a bit overwhelming.

I’ve defined 16 terms that you need to know before you go to Cable-Tec 2019:

1. Multiple System Operator (MSO) – A corporate entity such as Charter, Comcast, Cox, and others that owns and/or operates more than one cable system. “MSO” is not intended to be a generic abbreviation for all cable companies, even though the abbreviation is commonly misused that way. A local cable system is not an MSO, either – although it might be owned by one – it’s just a cable system. An important point: All MSOs are cable operators, but not all cable operators are MSOs.

2. Hybrid Fiber/Coax (HFC) – A cable network architecture developed in the 1980s that uses a combination of optical fiber and coaxial cable to transport signals to/from subscribers. Prior to what we now call HFC, the cable industry used all-coaxial cable “tree-and-branch” architectures.

3. Wireless – Any service that uses radio waves to transmit/receive video, voice, and/or data in the over-the-air spectrum. Examples of wireless telecommunications technology include cellular (mobile) telephones, two-way radio, and Wi-Fi. Over-the-air broadcast TV and AM & FM radio are forms of wireless communications, too.

4. Wi-Fi 6 – The next generation of Wi-Fi technology, based upon the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11ax standard (the sixth 802.11 standard, hence the “6” in Wi-Fi 6), that is said to support maximum theoretical data speeds upwards of 10 Gbps.

5. Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS®) – A family of CableLabs specifications for standardized cable modem-based high-speed data service over cable networks. DOCSIS is intended to ensure interoperability among various manufacturers’ cable modems and related headend equipment. Over the years the industry has seen DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1 (the latest deployed version), with DOCSIS 4.0 in the works.

6. Gigabit Service – A class of high-speed data service in which the nominal data transmission rate is 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), or 1 billion bits per second. Gigabit service can be asymmetrical (for instance, 1 Gbps in the downstream and a slower speed in the upstream) or symmetrical (1 Gbps in both directions). Cable operators around the world have for the past couple years been deploying DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem technology to support gigabit data service over HFC networks.

7. Full Duplex (FDX) DOCSIS – An extension to the DOCSIS 3.1 specification that supports transmission of downstream and upstream signals on the same frequencies at the same time, targeting data speeds of up to 10 Gbps in the downstream and 5 Gbps in the upstream! The magic of echo cancellation and other technologies allows signals traveling in different directions through the coaxial cable to simultaneously occupy the same frequencies.

8. Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) – Existing DOCSIS specifications spell out technical parameters for equipment operation on HFC network frequencies from as low as 5 MHz to as high as 1218 MHz (also called 1.2 GHz). Operation on frequencies higher than 1218 MHz is called extended spectrum DOCSIS, with upper frequency limits as high as 1794 MHz (aka 1.8 GHz) to 3 GHz or more! CableLabs is working on DOCSIS 4.0, which will initially spell out metrics for operation up to at least 1.8 GHz.

9. Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) – An electronic device installed in a cable operator’s headend or hub site that converts digital data to/from the Internet to radio frequency (RF) signals that can be carried on the cable network. A converged cable access platform (CCAP) can be thought of as similar to a CMTS. Examples include Cisco’s uBR-10012 and cBR-8.

10. 5G – According to Wikipedia, “5G is the fifth generation cellular network technology.” You probably already have a smart phone or tablet that is compatible with fourth generation (4G) cellular technology, the latter sometimes called long term evolution (LTE). Service providers are installing new towers in neighborhoods to support 5G, which will provide their subscribers with much faster data speeds. Those towers have to be closer together (which means more of them) because of plans to operate on much higher frequencies than earlier generation technology. So, what does 5G have to do with cable? Plenty! For one thing, the cable industry is well-positioned to partner with telcos to provide “backhaul” interconnections between the new 5G towers and the telcos’ facilities. Those backhauls can be done over some of our fiber, as well as over our HFC networks using DOCSIS.

11. 10G – Not to be confused with 5G, this term refers to the cable industry’s broadband technology platform of the future that will deliver at least 10 gigabits per second to and from the residential premises. 10G supports better security and lower latency, and will take advantage of a variety of technologies such as DOCSIS 3.1, full duplex DOCSIS, wireless, coherent optics, and more.

12. Internet of Things (IoT) – IoT is simply the point in time when more ‘things or objects’ were connected to the Internet than people. Think of interconnecting and managing billions of wired and wireless sensors, embedded systems, appliances, and more. Making it all work, while maintaining privacy and security, and keeping power consumption to a minimum are among the challenges of IoT.

13. Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) – An umbrella term that, according to CableLabs, describes relocating certain functions typically found in a cable network’s headends and hub sites closer to the subscriber. Two primary types of DAA are remote PHY and flexible MAC architecture, described below. Think of the MAC (media access control) as the circuitry where DOCSIS processing takes place, and the PHY (physical layer) as the circuitry where DOCSIS and other RF signals are generated and received.

14. Remote PHY (R-PHY) – A subset of DAA in which a CCAP’s PHY layer electronics are separated from the MAC layer electronics, typically with the PHY electronics located in a separate shelf or optical fiber node. A remote PHY device (RPD) module or circuit is installed in a shelf or node, and the RPD functions as the downstream RF signal transmitter and upstream RF signal receiver. The interconnection between the RPD and the core (such as Cisco’s cBR-8) is via digital fiber, typically 10 Gbps Ethernet.

15. Flexible MAC Architecture (FMA) – Originally called remote MAC/PHY (in which the MAC and PHY electronics are installed in a node), FMA provides more flexibility regarding where MAC layer electronics can be located: headend/hub site, node (with the PHY electronics), or somewhere else.

16. Cloud – I remember seeing a meme online that defined the cloud a bit tongue-in-cheek as “someone else’s computer.” When we say cloud computing, that often means the use of remote computer resources, located in a third-party server facility and accessed via the Internet. Sometimes the server(s) might be in or near one’s own facility. What is called the cloud is used for storing data, computer processing, and for emulating certain functionality in software that previously relied upon dedicated local hardware.

There are many more terms and phrases you’ll see and hear at Cable-Tec Expo than can be covered here. If you find something that has you stumped, stop by Cisco’s booth (Booth 1301) and ask one of our experts.

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Cable Service Providers: You Have a New Game to Play. And You Have the Edge

Time to take gaming seriously

Video gaming is huge, by any measure you choose. By revenue, it’s expected to be more than $150 billion in 2019, making it bigger than movies, TV and digital music, with a strong 9% CAGR.

And it’s not just teenagers. Two-thirds of adult Americans — your paying customers — call themselves gamers.

This makes gaming one of the biggest opportunities you face as a cable provider today. But how can you win those gamers over and generate revenue from them?

New demands on the network

A person’s overall online gaming experience depends on lots of factors, from their client device’s performance through to the GPUs in the data center. But the network — your network — clearly plays a critical role. And gaming related traffic is already growing on your networks. Cisco’s VNI predicts that by 2022, gaming will make up 15% of all internet traffic.

When Gamers talk about “lag” affecting their play, saying they care about milliseconds of latency, they really mean overall performance – latency, jitter, drops. Notice how latency changes the gamer’s position (red vs blue) in the below screenshot:

Many would even pay a premium not just for a lower ping time, but also for a more stable one, with less jitter and no dropped packets. Deterministic SLAs become key.

But latency, jitter and drops aren’t the only factors here. Gamers also need tremendous bandwidth, especially for:

◈ Downloading games (and subsequent patches) after the purchase. Many games can exceed 100 GB in size!

◈ Watching others’ video gameplay on YouTube or Twitch. The most popular gamer on YouTube has nearly 35 million subscribers!

◈ Playing the games using cloud gaming services such as the upcoming Google Stadia. 4K cloud gaming could require around 15 GB per hour, twice that of a Netflix 4K movie.

In many cases, the upstream is as important as downstream bandwidth — an opportunity for cable ISPs to differentiate themselves on all those factors with end-to-end innovations.

Your chance to lead

As a cable ISP, you’re the first port of call for gamers looking for a better experience. You can earn their loyalty with enhanced Quality of Experience and even drive new premium service revenue from it.

There’s opportunity for you to be creative, forging new partnerships with gaming providers, hosting gaming servers in your facilities, and even providing premium SLAs for your gaming customers along with new service plans.

But there’s plenty to be done in the network to make these opportunities real.

At the SCTE Expo, we will be discussing specific recommendations for each network domain. To give a teaser, in access network domain, you need to take action to reduce congestion and increase data rate, setting up prioritized service flows for gaming to assure QoS. New technologies like Low Latency DOCSIS (LLD) will be critical for delivering the performance your customers want, optimizing traffic flows and potentially delivering sub-1ms latency without any need to overhaul your HFC network infrastructure itself. In the peering domain, you need to … OK, let’s save that for the live discussion. We will be happy to help on all those fronts.

The cable edge is your competitive edge

Gaming is not the only low-latency use case in town. For example, Mobile Xhaul (including CBRS) and IoT applications depend on ultra-responsive and reliable network connectivity between nodes. And there are plenty of other use cases beyond gaming that are putting new strains on pure capacity, including video and CDNs.

All of these use cases too will benefit from the traffic optimization that LLD enables, but it’s only part of the solution.

IT companies of all shapes and sizes are recognizing that for many of these use cases, putting application compute closer to the customers, at the edge, is the only way forward. 

After all, the best way to reduce latency (and offer better experience) is to cut the route length by hosting application workloads as geographically and topologically close to the customers as possible. This approach also reduces the need for high network bandwidth capacity to the centralized data centers for bandwidth-heavy applications like video and CDN.

Imagine a gaming server colocated in a hub giving local players less than 10ms latency/jitter. Or a machine-vision application that monitors surveillance camera footage for alerts right at the edge, eliminating the need to send the whole livestream back to a central data center. The possibilities are endless.

Expand your hub sites into application cloud edge

In the edge world, your real differentiator becomes the thousands of hub sites that you use to house your CMTS/CCAP, EQAM and other access equipment — sites that SaaS companies and IT startups simply can’t replicate. Far from being a liability to shed and consolidate, this distributed infrastructure is one of your critical advantages. 

By expanding the role of your hub sites into application cloud edge sites, you can increase utilization of your existing infrastructure (for example, cloud-native CCAP), and generate revenue (for example, hosting B2B applications), both by innovating new services of your own and by giving third-party service providers access to geographic proximity to their B2B and B2C users. 

If you’re also a mobile operator, this model also allows you to move many virtualized RAN functions for into your hub sites, leaving a streamlined set of functions on the cell site itself (this edge cloud model is one that Rakuten is using for its 5G-ready rollout, across 4,000 edge sites).

Making cable edge compute happen

We’ve introduced the concept of Cable Edge Compute, describing how you can turn your hubs into next generation application-centric cloud sites to capture this wide-ranging opportunity.

While edge compute architectures do present a number of challenges — from physical space, power & cooling constraints to extra management complexity and new investment in equipments — these are all solvable with the optimal innovations, right design and management approaches. It’s vital to approach an initiative like this with an end-to-end service mindset, looking at topics like assurance, orchestration and scalability from the start.

Four key ingredients for cable edge compute

Here are essentially four key ingredients for a cost-optimized cable edge compute architecture: 

1. Edge hardware: takes the form of standardized, common SKU modular pods with x86 compute nodes and top-of-rack switches, with optional GPUs and other specialized processing acceleration for specific applications. Modularity, Consistency and flexibility are key here, so as to be able to scale easily. 

2. Software stack: enables the Edge hardware to optimally host a wide range of virtualized applications in containers or VMs or both, whether managed through Kubernetes or Openstack or something else. What’s important is to minimize the x86 CPU cores usage by the software stack and provide deterministic performance. Cisco has made it possible by combining cloud controller nodes with the compute nodes at the edge, but moving storage nodes and management nodes to the remote clusters with specific optimization and security. This optimizes the usage of physical space and power in the Hub site.  

3. Network Fabric: provides ultra-fast connectivity for the application workloads to communicate with each other and consumers. A one- or two-tier programmable network fabric based on 10GE/40GE/100GE/400GE Ethernet transport with end-to-end IPv6 and BGP-based VPN. 

4. And finally, this infrastructure model depends totally on SDN with automation, orchestration and assurance. Configuration and provisioning must be possible remotely via intent files, for example. At this scale, with an architecture this distributed, tasks should be zero-touch across the lifecycle. Assurance is utterly foundational, both to assure appropriate per-application SLAs and the enforcement of policy around prioritization, security and privacy. 

Discover your opportunity with low-latency and edge compute

In the new world of low-latency apps delivered through the edge, cable SPs are in a great position.  

And there’s never been a better opportunity to learn more about what this future holds. Cisco CX is presenting at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo on the gaming opportunity and cable edge compute, and we’ve published two new white papers that you can consult as an SCTE member.

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Managing a DAA Hub with Analog and Digital Nodes in a Single Context

The building blocks for a distributed access architecture (DAA) are shipping from Cisco. More than 60 customers in 25 countries spanning 4 continents have received key DAA components, such as Remote PHY nodes, Remote PHY shelves, cBR-8 digital cards and Smart PHY automation software. DAA holds much promise to simplify cable operations and improve overall network reliability and makes it easier to manage and configure the cable network and the services that are delivered by the network. As part of DAA, employing Remote PHY devices (RPDs) in nodes are a key element to enable 10G digital optics, Ethernet and IP used for delivering services to nodes.

Another network element that is key to DAA success is a rack mounted RPD shelf. Rack mounted RPDs are designed to connect analog nodes to digital Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) cores. Installed in the hub or headend, they are connected to CCAP cores via 10G digital optical connections routed through Layer2/3 Ethernet switch routers. The output of each rack mount RPD is traditional RF analog broadband, which is connected to analog fiber optics that transmit to and from legacy analog nodes in the access network. Rack mounted RPDs allow digital fiber optics and Ethernet to replace cumbersome RF hub-based coaxial distribution cables and amplifiers that were used to feed analog optical transmitters.

There are two use cases for RPD shelves. The first use case is to enable one CCAP core to serve multiple small and/or distant hubs via digital fiber (i.e. hub site consolidation). The benefits are appreciable savings in both CCAP equipment and operations costs, because RPD shelves enable CCAP processing in fewer locations, using longer distance digital optics between one CCAP core and multiple remote hubs, each with one or more RPD shelf.

However, there is a second, equally valuable benefit of RPD shelves. Consider a network in which a large portion, but not all, of the hub nodes will be upgraded to an N+0 (node + 0), DAA architecture.  For this portion of the network, it doesn’t make economic sense to rebuild and convert existing analog nodes to digital (RPD) nodes. The cable operator is faced with operating and managing a portion of the network with conventional edge QAMs, combining networks and analog optics, while the majority of the network employs digital optics, Ethernet and IP routing to do the same things. Instead of making operations simpler, operations is faced with supporting both the legacy network and the new digital network, having to support two very different operating procedures simultaneously in the same hub.

By using Remote PHY shelves to provide all connectivity to analog nodes, this problem is solved. A single, unified mode of operations is created for the hub, across both the analog and digital portions of the network. Specifically, RF combining networks and amplifiers in the hub can be completely eliminated, replaced by Ethernet switches and digital optics. Video services can be converged with data through the CCAP core if desired. Analog RF outputs from CCAP platforms can be eliminated, and CCAP platforms can be operated as CCAP cores, resulting in a higher service group density per platform. Future node splits can be done in digital, even if the node being split is analog. Simply put, Remote PHY shelves enable a hybrid analog/digital network to be managed as a single DAA network.

Software and hardware interoperability continue to be essential for enabling a DAA. The Open Remote PHY Device (OpenRPD) initiative was established to stimulate the adoption of a DAA by providing reference software for OpenRPD members, encouraging future OpenRPD devices to be based on interoperable software standards and enabling them to develop OpenRPD devices more quickly than by developing code from scratch. Cisco continues to be a key member of the initiative, openly developing and contributing significant portions of RPD software code to the initiative. To verify that hardware and software interoperability work as advertised, CableLabs® has established thorough CCAP core and RPD interoperability testing. Cable operators looking to migrate to a DAA can look for CableLabs’ stamp of interoperable approval and be confident that the devices they choose will work in a multivendor network. As an active participant in interoperability testing, Cisco is committed to interoperability.

The Distributed Access Architecture is a dramatic evolutionary change in the cable network. It is a step toward cloud-native CCAP and the evolution of cable networks to a Converged Interconnect Network (CIN). With our comprehensive hardware and software portfolio for DAA, including the cBR-8 platform, Remote PHY digital nodes and Smart Digital Nodes, Remote PHY shelves that can be configured for redundant operation, and SmartPHY software, Cisco can help cable operators radically simplify the configuration and management of DAA networks.

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The Advantage of Remote PHY

In a recently published white paper, The TCO Advantage of Remote PHY, we compare the CAPEX and OPEX of a Remote PHY deployment with an Integrated CCAP/HFC deployment. A next-generation Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), Remote PHY moves access hardware from the headend to smaller hub sites or into the plant, providing cable operators with a number of benefits including a reduced footprint, lower operational costs and bandwidth growth.

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