Mike:
Re: Using Central Offices with Cable Voice
The central office will be with us for years, though cable will ultimately be the way it
will migrate from the network to the subscriber terminal. We will likely look back
and see four generations of cable voice systems over 20 years. Let me make a
prediction of how voice call services will evolve. Mind you this prediction is worth
less than the paper it is printed on.
1G Cable Voice: 1996-2001
First generation (1G) cable used proprietary solutions over the last five years to
provide cable voice: NT/ANTC, ADC, and Tellabs were/are the primarily providers.
2G Cable Voice: 2001-2011
It is almost certain that cable voice will use CO's for the next five years.. Whether
they lease capacity on a ILEC's, or buy a CO (more likely in my opinion) is a
business decision. Call this 2G cable, using DOCSIS 1.1 terminals. The three above
"incumbent" vendors will provide the systems, with Cisco and Lucent trying to get
into the business, along with about 200 others. Cable standards will migrate
globally; other international players will include the usual suspects (Alcatel, Siemens,
NEC, etc.)
3G Cable Voice: 2003-20013
Over the next five years, VoIP solutions- not using 'soft-switch', ITU, or IETF
standards, but using Cablelabs standards- will start to roll out. Call this 3G. In this
model there are network call servers using open protocols that interwork with the
existing PSTN and allow in-network calls over the managed IP network. However,
the 'intelligence' remains in the network. Many start ups will try to get into the
business, but an end to end solution that glues all the pieces together from the SS7
network to the end user DOCSIS terminal will probably result in the same big
players, who will buy out successful start ups and integrate them into their solutions.
4G Cable Voice: 2006-2015...
Over the next ten years the intelligence will move into the terminal, which will be
something like a workstation running central office software, the way your computer
runs a browser to read text based HTML. At the moment I can't begin to imagine
how to handle the complexities associated with this, but no doubt this will be worked
out by some new unknown player- the Netscape of cable voice. The move to this
model will likely require FTTH with DWDM or ethernet or something since you lose
traffic management capabilities.
Conclusion:
Since this is basically a monopoly business, unless FTTH comes along to rival it, the
rollout will be driven by business cases make by the cable providers. At the
moment, Central Offices are very low cost: about $200 per analog line for both
software and hardware, and the per line cost maybe be even lower for the fully digital
access cable will use. However, they have high starting costs: on the order of
$1,000,000 for the smallest system. These cost tradeoffs will drive the buy or lease
decision for 2G Cable Once you buy it, you will likely keep it for ten years. This will
provide all the existing call features, and video on demand and video conferencing.
Also note that the only real competition to cable voice also uses Central Offices, so if
they can compete on cost they are somewhat protected from competition on services:
they can offer whatever the ILECs can offer.
3G will likely be driven by the need for new services- at the moment the per port cost
is higher than the line cost of a CO, the start up lower, but the exciting new features
are not ready yet. At the moment I sense that cable providers were not buying CO's
since they were hoping 3G would be ready, but now realize that they will have to
provide CO's or forego revenue.
At the moment I have no idea what the business case will be for 4G. Basically, you
are asking home owners to run their own CO, and service providers to throw away
$100 per month in services for a fixed monthly access fee. We will see. |
