George, I dropped this by for you.
HLIT is building this with C-Cor and GIC! Its
mainly HLIT,TCOMA(lead by Tony Werner),and Bell Labs breakthrough! This is
big,big news!
multichannel.com
Broadband Week for July 12, 1999
AT&T's Salt Lake HFC
Trial Seeks More Than Low
Costs
By FRED DAWSON July 12, 1999
AT&T Broadband & Internet Services has more up
its sleeve than merely another fiber-technology test
with the trial of a new hybrid fiber-coaxial design in
Salt Lake City this fall.
If all goes according to the expectations of at least
some company strategists, the MSO could end up
redefining how Internet protocol-based voice and
data services are transmitted over cable -- in effect
outdating the existing cable-modem standard.
But first, the company will have to demonstrate
that the basic HFC design concept -- dubbed
"Lightwire" internally and widely known as
"mini-fiber node" -- is a practical option, AT&T
Broadband spokesman Mark Siegel said.
"This architecture is something we're testing in
anticipation that we're going to get millions of
subscribers for our advanced services," Siegel
said. "If we do, the current architecture -- where
600 households are served from a fiber node -- may
not be the best approach. But it remains to be
seen whether the new design is the right one."
The Salt Lake City trial, passing 66,000 homes and
turning on in October, follows a six-month study of
multiple options for improving network performance
and capacity through segmentation of nodes.
During that time, engineers from AT&T Labs
worked closely with the engineering team of the
former Tele-Communications Inc., led by chief
technical officer Tony Werner.
Based on that study, the company believes it can
extend fiber deep enough to eliminate all in-line
amplifiers on the coax network, thus reducing
serving-area sizes to under 100 households at a
cost of $40 per home passed, AT&T Labs district
manager Xiaolin Lu said.
Describing the two-phase trial plans in a
presentation at the National Show in Chicago last
month, Lu predicted that the operational savings
from lower power consumption and eliminating or
reducing many maintenance procedures needed to
keep amplifiers properly tuned would add up to
about $11 per home, per year.
These numbers alone, assuming that the cost
projections are right, could justify using the
approach in systems that have yet to be upgraded
to two-way HFC status, AT&T Broadband district
manager for product realization Marty Davidson
said.
But Lu and Davidson noted that the real payoff on
the new design could be the means by which the
freed-up bandwidth on the unamplified coax --
adding at least 250 megahertz to the 750 MHz now
commonly available -- is put to use in phase two of
the trial.
Rather than delivering signals over that spectrum
and in the return in traditional modes, the MSO
could use time-division multiplexing on an
end-to-end basis, allowing each serving area to
operate like a local-area network.
"You can use the mini-fiber node to do some local
signaling, enabling very low-cost, very simple
media-access protocols, versus having to resolve
everything back at the headend," Lu said. "You can
utilize some kind of Ethernet off-the-shelf product
as the cable modem."
Such a capability would eliminate the requirements
for the complex media-access control,
quality-of-service and other functionalities
associated with today's data delivery over HFC,
thereby possibly extending the cost justification for
the deep fiber deployment to a much broader base
of systems, including those already upgraded,
Davidson said.
"CPE [customer-premises equipment] is the
biggest cost factor in everything, so the payback
there could be a major benefit," he noted.
Hiram |
