Okay, if you look hard enough the information is there. Here's an article that goes deeper into the new packet level voice services being readied for cable operators. Here, @work is specified, but over cable facilities <?>, but there is no mention of regular @home users getting it.
Eric, some of the answers to your questions are bolded below.
Given the intricacies that these developments portend, at the protocol and network hardware levels, you can begin to appreciate better now what I've been stating up to this point about how adding multiple players to the last mile on these same circumstances could become very difficult.
Enjoy, Frank Coluccio
=================
Taking Care of Business
Cablecos Reach Beyond Traditional Residential User Base
By Fred Dawson
06/01/99
Competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), incumbent LECs (ILECs), Internet service providers (ISPs) and anyone else chasing the small business market with packages of integrated voice and data services an expect major competition from a new quarter--the cable industry.
To date, cable's success in making its hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks
conduits for high-speed data service has not produced much noise on the
business front, even in the small-business market where cable lines are
more likely to be in place than is the case in large industrial parks and
downtown city centers. But that's because it has taken until now for the
cable industry to generate a class of modems and supporting protocols that
are conducive to success in the business market.
Revving Up for Business
Success on the facilities front is coming just as the market is realizing that low-cost, high-speedaccess makes possible a cluster of integrated data/voice applications benefiting dispersed enterprises as well as small businesses, notes Don Hutchison, senior vice president and general manager of the @Work unit of @Home Corp., Redwood City, Calif. Cable's ability to deliver residential remote worker extensions to these applications makes its opportunity especially attractive, he adds.
"We've had great early success with telecommuting applications," Hutchison says. "The main challenge for us is to have the reach we need in the business market."
Bringing the residential and business pieces together will be much easier
now that AT&T Corp., which purchased New York-based Teleport
Communications Group Inc. last year, has become the major stakeholder in
@Home. Its acquisition of Tele-Communications Inc. doesn't hurt either.
AT&T also is helping its own and other operators' business agendas by
setting stipulations for a toll-class Internet protocol (IP) telephony
architecture over cable that's tightly tied to emerging business market
requirements, notes David Bukovinsky, director of the IP telephony
specifications process, known as PacketCable, at Louisville, Colo.-based
Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs).
"AT&T has had the effect of pushing us much faster on what we had
thought of as the second phase of the PacketCable initiative," Bukovinsky
says. Now, he adds, the AT&T architectural requirements will be part of
phase one, which is to produce the specifications for delivering first-line
voice services in IP format sometime in August.
These developments reflect a strong change of attitude among cable
industry leaders, Hutchison notes. "Cable's involvement [in business data
services] has gone from interest at the planning level to serious
engagement at the field level," he says. "After watching us, our cable
partners have a growing sense that there's money here."
Nonetheless, @Work is pushing ahead of cable with its business agenda by
contracting for use of digital subscriber line (DSL) facilities from San
Francisco-based NorthPoint Communi-cations Inc. on a nationwide basis.
The ISP has expanded rapidly with the launch of NorthPoint in some 14
markets and is now generating revenues that are close to par with sales on
the @Home residential side, Hutchison says.
But no matter how much @Work uses DSL, it sees HFC as its primary
asset and wants to exploit it to the fullest extent possible, Hutchison says.
"There's a first-to-market opportunity taking shape just as the [HFC]
technology platform is coming together," he notes.
Overcoming Hurdles
The real question where cable's pursuit of the business market is
concerned is whether the industry has the mindset needed to succeed,
notes Ron Pitcock, president and chief operating officer of High Speed
Access Corp., which competes with @Home in the cable data market.
While cable operators have taken intermittent stabs at serving the business
market, the commercial services arena largely remains untapped, despite its
explosive revenue potential, he adds.
"You can argue there's a much bigger opportunity, especially in the near
term, in the small-business sector rather than residential, but it's not an area
multiple system operators (MSOs) are used to serving," he notes. "This is a
highly specialized arena that requires an understanding of niche needs and
strong customer service support."
Along with an operations culture oriented toward residential services, cable
has to overcome a lot of distractions, including entry into the voice business
and the launch of interactive TV programming, if it's going to get its arms
around the business sector, notes Jay Rolls, director of multimedia
technology at Cox Communications Inc., Atlanta.
"Commercial services are a major opportunity, but, frankly, there's only so
much you can handle at once," Rolls says.
But Cox offers an example of what's in store as the attraction of new
revenues overcomes the distractions.
"We're in a much better position now to move on this front than we have
been," Rolls says.
Last year, in a service rollout in Southern California, Cox became the first
MSO affiliate of @Home to use HFC plant to deliver services supplied by
@Work. Now, Rolls says, the company is widely deploying cable modem
termination systems (CMTSs) in its headends that are built to the
specifications of DOCSIS 1.1, the new advanced version of the cable
modem standard known as the "data over cable system interface
specification."
These new headend systems provide the mechanisms by which cable
operators will be able to establish different levels of service ranging from
the "best-effort" contention-based category that's now serving some
700,000 residential users in North America to fixed quality of service (QoS)
levels with reliability parameters in the "four nines" range (99.99 percent as
established by the former Bellcore, now Telcordia Technologies Inc.,
Morristown, N.J.), which is the measure to be met by the Phase One
PacketCable specifications. These new systems provide for dynamic as
well as fixed allocation of downstream and upstream bandwidth,
Bukovinsky notes.
While most cable companies aren't expected to launch first-line IP voice
services until sometime in the second half of next year, the new DOCSIS
1.1 capabilities allow cable operators to put the power of IP telephony to
use much sooner over high-speed access channels in the business market,
says Ian Aaron, president of San Francisco-based ISP Channel, another
cable data provider. ISP Channel is involved in a project just getting under
way in Lake Travis, Texas, outside Austin, that explores opportunities even
the smallest operators might pursue as the integrated data/voice platform
takes shape, Aaron says.
In a market trial spearheaded by long distance carrier IXC
Communications Inc., Austin, Texas, in cooperation with local cable
operator Cablevision of Lake Travis, the participants want to size up "the
technical and marketing challenges behind deploying and scaling IP
telephony in hundreds of small to mid-sized cable systems," Aaron says.
These are especially good markets for cable, owing to the lack of
high-speed access alternatives and a dearth of expertise in applications
hosting and integrated voice and data services, he adds.
"We're finding a lot of receptivity to the idea from cable operators,
especially in second-tier markets," agrees Chris Rothlis, IXC's vice
president of new product development. These markets where cable
companies are often not affiliated with the leading cable data
providers--Road Runner and @Home Network--offer an outsider like IXC
an opportunity to provide expertise as well as long-haul backbone support
that can make business services an attractive proposition for cable, Rothlis
notes.
At press time, IXC was set to begin testing use of virtual private network
(VPN) technology to provide remotely located IXC employees with
guaranteed bandwidth for advanced voice and data communications.
"We're putting together a coherent package of VPN and IP telephony in an
effort to understand what it takes to support it from the standpoint of billing,
order entry, provisioning and operations management," Rothlis says.
While the test is slated to last six months, IXC could move to commercial
deployment in conjunction with cable operators in other markets well
before the trial is over, Rothlis adds. "Cable isn't our only point of
connectivity in the local market, but we view it as crucial to our plans," he
says.
IXC, with approximately 10,000 route miles of fiber in place, has focused
its business efforts on wholesale and retail delivery of long distance voice
service, with integration of data a key aspect of its strategy as a
next-generation carrier. Now, like other interexchange carriers, the
company is looking for ways to directly access the local customer base in
competition with ILECs and CLECs for second-line revenues.
"We're not trying to be a CLEC, but rather are focusing on offering
second-line enhanced services, assuming our trial leads us in this direction,"
Rothlis says. In the remote worker application, the second line over cable's
high-speed data channel ties employees into their office private branch
exchanges (PBXs) on the voice side while connecting them directly to their
local area networks (LANs) behind the company firewall, he says.
Taking a New Route
One key indicator that this sort of thinking is prompting action among
operators large and small is the early success of a four-port small-business
class router/modem that San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc.
developed to work with DOCSIS 1.1 CMTSs. At a moment when
DOCSIS 1.1 deployments are still few and far between and the DOCSIS
1.1 certification process at CableLabs has yet to begin, Cisco reports that
some two dozen cable companies have deployed thousands of the Cisco
uBR904 router/modems.
While cable operators will need sales support to make a serious play in the
small-business market, the availability of a product like the Cisco
router/modem vastly simplifies the provisioning of services, says Paul
Bosco, general manager for cable products and solutions at Cisco. List
priced at $900, the unit supports a variety of QoS features, including
fairness maintenance, which prevents any one user from hogging
bandwidth; committed access rate, which assures users a minimum access
rate; and the ability to provide a fixed rate of guaranteed access at
higher-priced tiers.
The unit supports connection of four PCs in a small LAN arrangement,
providing IP routing support, fast switching and network address
translation, among other features, Bosco says. It also offers two layers of
security as well as support for IP tunneling, he adds.
"This system supports a much more robust connection for these types of
applications over the HFC network than you can get over other types of
access options," Bosco asserts. "I think you'll see small office/home office
(SOHO) and telecommuter applications where things like
videoconferencing come into play very quickly."
With AT&T driving development of a business-class packet
telecommunications platform and the market clamoring for
applications-hosted, voice-enhanced and other IP-based broadband
services, it doesn't seem likely that even the most entertainment-hardened
cable veteran will resist taking the plunge into the business market. The
resulting splash could be something to watch out for.
|
