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To: Stoctrash who wrote (48858)	3/23/2000 7:24:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

AT&T's LightWire(Harmonic is a supplier)................. cedmagazine.com part II The prospects for dramatic improvements along these lines are reflected in plans for a third phase of the company's "LightWire" version of the traditional cable hybrid fiber/coax network. The company has been testing the first phase of this design over 600 miles of commercially operating plant in its Salt Lake City system with strong results, prompting it to begin using the design for upgrade projects that were already slated for this year under the old HFC approach. As currently deployed, LightWire entails extension of fiber to "mini-fiber nodes" at interface points on the existing coaxial cable plant that have the effect of eliminating all in-line amplifiers between the node and end users. According to Oleh Sniezko, AT&T BIS vice president of engineering, this use of fiber reduces the number of people contending for bandwidth over any coaxial serving area and cuts the ongoing maintenance and performance hassles associated with use of traditional coaxial amplifiers. But the long-term benefits of LightWire could be much greater, as reflected in the company's thinking about Phases II and III of the design migration, Sniezko says. "We want to do distributed processing," he says, which means that rather than keeping all the cable modem termination system functions that control distribution of data services in the headend, as is now the case, much of the CMTS functionality would be positioned at remote fiber node locations in the field. check the picture Figure 1: AT&Tås LightWire-II: Making it more passive. Source: Oleh Sniezko and Xiaolin Lu, AT&T BIS, 2000 SCTE Conf. on Emerging Technologies Proc. Manual, p. 505. "I'd guess that in five years, distributed CMTSs will be used in 80 percent of our systems," Sniezko says.