Philips/Canal Plus/Divicom working out the bugs...................
multichannel.com
MediaOne Plugs Away at Open System Deployment
By BILL MENEZES August 2, 1999
With its self-imposed second-quarter deadline having come and gone, MediaOne Group and its vendors quietly continue pushing toward deployment of the first "open" U.S. cable system.
Systems have been moved from the laboratory to field deployment in an unidentified market. And as engineers work to iron out remaining nuts-and-bolts technical issues, the MSO is focusing less on its previous, admittedly ambitious schedule and more on making sure the groundbreaking network performs according to plan.
"We're determined we're not going to launch unless we're satisfied the system is really open and it's got every bit of quality our customers expect," said Bud Wonsiewicz, MediaOne's chief technology officer. "All the companies feel their reputation is riding on this launch, so we're determined to do it in a really first-class way."
There was fanfare back in February when MediaOne announced its plans to become the first cable operator to break from the General Instrument Corp./Scientific Atlanta Inc. platform that dominates the U.S. market. MediaOne picked Philips Electronics, Canal Plus Technologies and Divicom Inc. to deploy a cable system based on the Digital Video Broadcasting platform used widely in Europe and by direct-broadcast-satellite companies.
Canal Plus is supplying the software platform, incorporating its MediaGuard conditional access system and MediaHighway interactive applications software; DiviCom is installing OpenCable-qualified headends; and Philips is supplying its OpenCable-oriented digital set-top boxes, which have a DAVIC-based return channel.
MediaOne said it was following the U.S. cable industry's OpenCable standardization effort, which is aimed at creating huge cost efficiencies and a new retail presence by promoting systems that would support digital set-top boxes and applications from a broad range of manufacturers and software developers.
"They have fairly rapid product development cycles, rapidly dropping price points," Wonsiewicz said of the widely used international platforms. "And I believe the competitiveness of cable vis-à-vis satellite rests on us getting on the right kind of technology path."
Besides recruiting a vendor coalition that has participated in open-systems representing millions of set-top deployments in Europe and elsewhere, MediaOne reached an agreement with GI to produce an "evolved" version of its DCT-2000 set-top compatible with the Philips/Canal Plus/Divicom platform, for use in a second open-systems market.
MediaOne on June 30 announced the launches of three digital systems, in Cleveland, Cobb County, Ga., and Richmond, Va., using the DCT-2000. Conspicuously absent was any word of the DVB-oriented launch, which the MSO had said repeatedly would come by the end of the second quarter.
"We set out an extremely ambitious schedule; we're tracking it pretty closely right now," Wonsiewicz said in a recent interview. "In integrating parts from three vendors … as you put things together, you begin to find problems within the interfaces."
The reality is that it has taken longer than anticipated to ensure not only that the system is ready for commercial-quality service, but that it also meets the criteria for being "open" to all vendors' equipment following the OpenCable path.
"The difficulty for the system integrator is to make sure we are really providing an open system, so that if tomorrow they want to move forward with a different set-top vendor they can do it," said Jean-Marc Racine, CEO of Canal Plus U.S. Technologies, which is nominally the overall system integrator. "Let's not underestimate that, it's a huge achievement."
While MediaOne and its vendors are reluctant to talk in detail about the "blocking and tackling" still to be done before deployment, they agree that the open-system technology -- and their relationships in integrating it with one another's pieces -- has been sound.
"We didn't have any big surprises," said Emmanuel Dieppedald, program manager with Philips' Cable USA division. "We went to this market with big knowledge about the rest of the world. We didn't discover a lot of new things in this market."
The remaining work focuses on details rather than fundamental technology issues.
John Connelly, DiviCom's vice president of marketing, said development work on all subsystems has been completed and equipment has been deployed on site, with the partners now working through "very manageable" integration issues.
"The total focus is on getting the first commercial launch up and running, basically getting all the bugs are out of the different systems," Wonsiewicz said. "It's not just hardware and software, it's interfaces with billing systems we've been testing, getting people trained in the new hardware installation, all the myriad things that would accompany any digital deployment."
Complicating the project was the initial coordination necessary between relatively un-acquainted partners spread out in a trans-Atlantic endeavor. Corporate cultural differences between American, Dutch and French teams had to be ironed out so each could understand the other's project management disciplines, for example, and agree how to align their various responsibilities.
"There have been cases where we've had a team of 10 engineers in Paris and 10 engineers in Milpitas, Calif., simultaneously debugging stuff, with new software updates flashing across the Internet and being tested on real systems very quickly," Wonsiewicz said.
Those kinds of technical and logistical resources have been key in advancing the project, he added.
"If you're looking at a digital signal processing problem there's not just one or two engineers trying to debug it," he said. "It's a team of people from three or four different companies, all of whom are extremely skilled and who speak the same language, which is technical English."
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