Cable industry pushed to offer broadband services
By Junko Yoshida and George Leopold
EE Times
(12/17/99, 3:39 p.m. EDT)
LOS ANGELES — The cable TV world tuned in to fast home networks and cable telephony as the future of a converged network at the Western Show this past week. But a heavy dose of uncertainty was in the air, thanks to the arrival of a formidable new competitor — AT&T Co. — and debate over which killer apps the service providers will need to conjure up if they are to lure consumers to this broadband world.
With mergers and consolidation breaking up that old gang of cable operators, and new players like AT&T barging in, the cable industry no longer speaks in a single voice. "Cable operators now have disparate agendas," said Leo Hindery Jr., the former president of AT&T Broadband & Internet Services.
For its part, AT&T is seeking to develop new services like cable telephony to differentiate itself from its key competitor, local phone carriers. "We want to evolve to a network with an [Internet Protocol] backbone," said Lois Hedgepeth, president of AT&T's Consumer Marketing Division. "How do we take advantage of the large amount of bandwidth available to the home? The secret in my opinion is new applications."
Cable operators must find those hot applications fast. Fierce competition from satellite operators and phone companies is cranking up the pressure. At the same time, Internet service providers such as America Online are demanding that cable operators make room for their services on the cable TV broadband pipe. Without solid strategies and aggressive plans to compete, "The game is ours to lose," warned Ted Turner, vice chairman of Time Warner.
Helping push cable set-top boxes forward, Lucent Technologies this week detailed a trio of home-networking chips that use telephone wiring to create an in-home network. Lucent said these are the first devices to integrate phone-line networking, traditional modem and Ethernet capabilities onto one piece of silicon.
"Although we are still in a prehistoric era for voice-over-Internet Protocol, [cable operators] are interested in moving to offerings very quickly," said Eric Dewannain, general manager of cable broadband systems at Texas Instruments Inc.
Indeed, at a time when the cable industry hopes to expand broadband services not only for digital video, but also for high-speed data and IP telephony, the need for technology solutions is diversifying. As a result, the traditional cable industry culture — with a few select companies such as General Instrument and Scientific-Atlanta supplying key technology for development of proprietary solutions — is being radically altered. The mantra in cable today is "open systems," allowing more choices both for service operators and consumers.
An executive at Motorola Inc., which expects to complete its acquisition of set-top box manufacturer General Instrument by Jan. 7, said the uncertainties hitting the cable industry as it struggles to find applications for the home are creating new opportunities for a handful of vendors. Merle Gilmore, president of Motorola's communications enterprise unit, said the GI acquisition and related alliances position Motorola to take advantage of the "disruptions" arising from the merger of telecommunications, information and video networks.
Motorola is banking on wireless access technology, for which it has formed an alliance with Cisco Systems, to bring cable bandwidth to home networks. "Wireless will be the home LAN of choice," Gilmore predicted.
The General Instrument acquisition will mean the merger of a series of cable telephony and set-top box field trials the two companies have scheduled to begin next year. GI separately announced a series of deals here for the sale of several million of its DCT-5000 digital set-top boxes. Paul Allen's Charter Communications Inc., for example, has agreed to purchase up to 1 million boxes over the next two years.
Targeting major cable operators like AT&T, GI also unveiled a digital return-path platform that uses an optical link operating at 2.5 Gbits/second to relay return-path signals from cable hubs to headends. In addition, GI said it is working with Lucent Technologies to expand its IP telephony offerings.
The blistering pace of changes in cable is forcing companies like Philips, Motorola and Microsoft to make dramatic changes in their organizations in order to keep up. Microsoft Corp. said in November that it had reorganized its TV unit into separate WebTV-network and TV-platform groups. Similarly, Philips has moved its 800-person set-top technology operation out of Europe to Sunnyvale, Calif., to be closer to the action. That group, now called Home Access Solutions, covers a broad range of consumer devices that go into a digital home, including everything from satellite, cable and terrestrial set-top boxes to personal digital video-recording and home-networking technologies.
Philips announced its first foray into the U.S. cable market, a deal to supply an undisclosed number of set-tops to cable operator MediaOne's Jacksonville, Fla., network. "The U.S. cable industry is finally moving to open standards," said Willem de Zoete, president of Philips Home Access Solutions. "We felt [the chance to enter the market] is now or never."
The Philips group also oversees partnerships already in place with many U.S. companies in the set-top business, including AOL TV, DirecTV, EchoStar, TiVo and Microsoft's Web TV.
Furthermore, technology solutions offered by set-top vendors such as GI, Scientific-Atlanta and Philips are no longer tied to a single operating system or a single set of middleware.
GI, for example, has two set-top models. Its advanced digital set-top box, the DCT-5000+, runs GI's proprietary operating system, Liberate's software platform and MicrosoftTV, which is based on Windows CE. This high-end model uses a MIPS processor, ATI Technology's 2-D/3-D graphics processor and Broadcom's Docsis-compliant front-end chip and MPEG-2/AC-3 decoding IC.
Two CPUs, two OSes
Meanwhile, Scientific-Atlanta has three set-tops, the 2000, 3000 and 6000, each designed to run the PowerTV operating system on a Sparc CPU. Its advanced 6000 model, however, uses dual processors — Sparc and Hitachi's SH-4 — to run dual operating systems: PowerTV and MicrosoftTV. It also comes with Docsis-compliant modem and HDTV decoding capabilities.
Philips also has two set-tops. The box MediaOne is buying runs the MediaHighway software platform from Canal+, running on STMicroelectronics' ST20 controller, with 8 Mbytes of SDRAM and 6 Mbytes of flash. Philips' advanced set-top — which will be offered to European cable operator UPC, and is due for launch in mid-2000 — runs MicrosoftTV on a MIPS CPU, and packs a TriMedia 1300 processor to handle media decoding. The box integrates a two-way cable modem. |
