Talking Tech – Six of the industry’s top technical minds discuss VOD, voIP, and the forthcoming digital migration.
CED
May 2004
Six of cable’s top technical minds join CED’s annual CTO roundtable
CED Editor Jeff Baumgartner
Comcast = Fellows (Comcast)
Adelphia + Fawaz (Adelphia)
Cablevision = Hildebrand
Charter = Davis (Charter)
Cox = Boswick
Time Warner = LaJoie
1) Charter will NOT use Vonage. See below.
2) Per this article, Adelphia plans to have a voIP trial going by the end of the year.
Which confirms: [Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of corporate communications at Net2Phone, says Charter Communications will operate its own network for eight VoIP markets, but it plans to outsource 17 other markets to another VoIP provider such as Net2Phone. Adelphia is also considering outsourcing VoIP, she adds. [Sarah is aware of that re Charter because NTOP responded to Charter’s RFP. 17 markets is significantly more than I figured Charter's RFP involved.]
Posted 05/01/2004
Consumer VoIP Hits the Big Time
By Paula Bernier
x-changemag.com.]
VOIP COMMENTS, from the participants, along with the context:
The cable industry is being pelted from all sides by competition ranging from traditional foes like DBS to new, SIP-based IP voice service providers like Vonage and AT&T Corp. To stay ahead of the curve, operators are testing and deploying new service enhancements, ranging from high-def video-on-demand to feature-rich VoIP services. MSOs are also pondering how to make the bandwidth-restoring migration to all- (or mostly) digital.
CED assembled its annual virtual roundtable to explore how these services and issues are being handled today and what else might be on the drawing board for the rest of 2004. Joining CED Editor Jeff Baumgartner on the call were Adelphia Communications Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Marwan Fawaz (Adelphia); Cablevision Systems Corp. Executive Vice President of Engineering and Technology Wilt Hildenbrand (Cablevision); Charter Communications Senior Vice President of Engineering Wayne Davis (Charter); Comcast Cable CTO David Fellows (Comcast); Cox Communications CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering Chris Bowick (Cox); and Time Warner Cable CTO Mike LaJoie (Time Warner). An edited transcript follows.
CED: Let’s start by going around the horn and have you list, in order, what your top three or four priorities are for the rest of this year.
Fellows (Comcast): My first priority is to finish up my priorities from 2003…and that includes finishing the upgrades; rolling out video-on-demand from something like 50 percent of the footprint at the end of last year, to something over 80 percent at the end of this year; continuing high-definition [deployments] to more than 80 percent [of our footprint]. Number two is to get some momentum behind voice using Internet protocol and Internet techniques. Number three would be–I call it “increased digital” as opposed to “all-digital”–to begin the digital migration.
Fawaz (Adelphia): The top priority for us would be to finish our upgrades this year, and we’re well on our way to that. The next priority for us is what we call our enhanced digital video offerings– expanding our VOD footprint, DVR and high-def. Third on our list is not technology related, but what we call “better execution” when it comes to technical operations–putting in place proactive, preventive maintenance programs. Fourth on our list is to do our voice-over-IP trial by the end of this year.
LaJoie (Time Warner): I think we’re done with all of our upgrades, and we’ve deployed VOD everywhere, and HD is everywhere.
Bowick (Cox): You’re done! (laughter)
LaJoie (Time Warner): Having said that, we’re aggressively deploying voice-over-IP now. Today we’re in five markets. We’ll be in predominantly all of them by the end of the year. We have several tens of thousands of customers, and that’s been growing.
Voice-over-IP, I think, would probably be our number-one agenda item for this year. Number two would be OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform). We’re spending a lot of resources there, and we’re developing an OCAP stack, and we’re doing guide work around OCAP. We’re doing guide work around our legacy platform as well. Number three is kind of like what Marwan was talking about, and that’s service robustness. We’re coming out with high-def DVRs. This year, we’ll also launch multi-room DVR.
Bowick (Cox): Of our three primary areas of focus this year, number one would be growth. We had an outstanding year of growth in 2003. We certainly want to continue that trend both on the basic subscriber side, believe it or not, and on the new services side. The next one would be next-generation productivity improvement. This is a very highly transaction-oriented business as you know, [with] substantial numbers of connects and disconnects necessary to pull off this business. Our intent is to improve the rate of self-service, or self-installation, and also to reduce service calls. Last year we had service call reductions on the order of 18 percent, and we’re actually starting off this year just a tad better than that, and I hope to continue the trend.
The other thing would be winning in this highly competitive environment, which [will require] the continued growth of VOD and DVR technology, and improvements on the interactive television front, which we certainly intend to focus on. I would be remiss without mentioning that we’re pushing very hard toward an on-ramp to OCAP. We’d like to extend that down into the millions of set-tops that we’ve got out in the field for iTV applications, and be able to write on those.
On the circuit switched [voice] side, we have a little over a million subscribers and over 100,000 Cox Business Services business locations out there. But we want ubiquity in the bundle, so we’ve launched one market with voice-over-IP already. We’ve teed up another three, and if I can go faster, I’ll certainly do that.
Davis (Charter): Number one for us is to continue making operational improvements in service delivery. Chris talked about the improvement that they had. I think we had a little bit further to go. We saw a 26 percent improvement in service call ratios in 2003 over 2002. I think we’ve got some improvement to make there as well, and we’ll continue to focus on that in ’04 and beyond, because it’s something that really has to become a part of the culture and the company. We’re doing that by shifting a large part of our workforce from contractors to in-house, rolling out preventive maintenance programs, and so on.
That 26 percent improvement in service calls equated to nearly a half million [fewer] truck rolls year over year from 2002 to 2003.
Number two would be rolling out voice-over-IP. We have targeted over a million homes passed in ’04. That’s in three markets, and of course we’re scaling for 2005 to a greater degree.
Number three is what I’ll call “deployment excellence.” Whether it’s DVRs, or VOD, or telephony or whatever it might be, even something as simple as getting newbuild for that matter.
If there’s a number four it would be capturing the learning around all-digital. We’ve got a sandbox that we’re playing in right now, and that is in Long Beach, [Calif.].
Hildenbrand (Cablevision): We’ve finished all the [upgrades and rebuilds]. So it’s done, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle because it sets the groundwork for the necessary capacity, reliability and service reduction. It’s an interesting time–trying to roll out digital, roll out VOD, roll out telephony, roll out high-speed data, and at the same time have an undercurrent of things popping up in front of customers and techs alike. DVI and 1394 and component outputs and OCAP and CableCARDs and the rest of this stuff. So priority number one is making that stuff intelligible to the technical and installation and customer service base as well as the customers, because it’s quite an alphabet soup.
The second part covers a whole bunch of ground–now that we’ve built the network out, making sure we maximize everything we can get out of it. We’re knocking it really hard with cable modem penetration. The set-top box growth has been [going] through the roof and then some. VOD is everywhere. We’re just squeezing capacity out of the system and rolling out as many pieces as we can at the same time. Both [digital video and cable modems] set the stage... for the ability to roll out voice-over-IP. We’re [installing more than 500 new VoIP customers] a day, and it’s available systemwide. And, in fact, I’m on a voice-over-IP phone right now, just to be cute.
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CED – asked a question about going all-digital and getting a digital picture into the home with set-top boxes. The response from Adelphia was interesting, in that Charter is working on it in Los Angeles, and Adelphia is working with Charter (see url), i.e., Adelphia and Charter have a working relationship.
Fawaz (Adelphia): We’re looking at it just a little differently. We’re approaching a couple of markets that have bandwidth bottlenecks–these are 550 MHz [systems] that we’re trying to accelerate their upgrades by using...digital set-tops into homes and freeing up bandwidth specifically for high definition signals. In fact, we are working with Wayne (Fields; Charter) and his team in the L.A. market trying to build on some of the encoding work that they’ve done in Long Beach, and use some of that as a source to feed those 550 MHz areas.
In the past, Adelphia has said it will deploy cable telephony; but It won’t be first. It’s possible Adelphia may be planning to tie into what Charter is going to do re cable telephony.
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Comments re Vonage, and SIP-based services (NTOP provides both PacketCable (higher QOS) and SIP-based services; Vonage doesn't get there.
CED: What is your response to companies that push devices onto your plant with SIP-based services? Can you, or will you, monitor bandwidth to know what’s going on? Or can you make a cable telephony experience, using SIP or otherwise, better than what Vonage or AT&T can do through quality-of-service advancements?
Hildenbrand (Cablevision): I think you’ve got to be able to compete because you’re competing with it running on your network or not, and you are competing against a fairly well-entrenched incumbent, so a few other mosquitos flying around the edges doesn’t bother me much. I think you just offer a killer service at a killer price, bundled with a bunch of things, watch your Ps and Qs, and you can be pretty damned competitive.
Bowick (Cox): When you think about it, end-to-end control of the network is really what it’s all about, and QoS down to the subscriber should offer that subscriber a much better quality of service than they would otherwise get with a Vonage or an AT&T, just as examples. So we are in fact doing just that.
Davis (Charter): I think the relevant question is: Have you used Vonage? I certainly hope that we can deliver a better customer experience than that, and I think we have to. You’ve got the early adopters, the early techies that are the Vonage customers. In fact, I think most of the Vonage customers are probably cable people checking it out. But at this point in time we need to deliver something that is equivalent to what the consumer has experienced over the last “X” number of years, and probably even better. So the QoS experience is an absolutely critical part of this.
Fawaz (Adelphia): I don’t believe we want to put ourselves in the position of deploying QoS just to prevent others from competing on our network. The best way for us to compete is to provide a product that’s well bundled, that has superior customer service and one that our consumers will come to us for first before they go to a Vonage or AT&T. But what’s interesting, though, is that Vonage has made a pre-emptive strike by offering tools to provide for QoS services. They’re marketing a product that sits behind the cable modem that provides QoS for their service.
[Adelphia has to emerge from bankruptcy; will face any forthcoming purchase offers from Cox, Comcast, or Time Warner, if it chooses not to and Adelphia’s system is piecemealed out buyers who are interested in specific geographic areas of Adelphia's footprint; it is remotely possible Adelphia partner and emerge from bankrupcy – for example, Liberty Media (per just one news release) – Liberty has no ownersheip position in any U.S. cable MSO, and I don’t believe they would get into a bidding process to buy part of Adelphia. Emerging from bankruptcy will still take quite awhile. Adelphia is seeing what all the components are worth. Every large cable company bidding for Adelphia will face flak because of cash expenditure (billions), and the perception it is not in the best interest of shareholders. However, it is growth. They may partner in a bid. Doesn't mean Adelphia will take it. It could set a higher value on Adelphia, as it emerges from bankrupcy.]
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Video Telephony:
CED: What do you think about video telephony as a possible service or as a differentiator you can put into the market? Or is this still kind of a novelty at this point?
Hildenbrand (Cablevision): I think it’s inevitable, but we don’t have it yet.
Bowick (Cox): I personally love the concept. Whether or not it actually becomes something that is a possible differentiator, who knows? The platform is certainly capable of doing anything that we want to do in that regard, so I’m not worried about the platform technically. The question is again, just from a business perspective, does it make sense?
Davis (Charter): It’s the product differentiator. Whether it’s the video platform or the high-speed data platform or the telephony platform, all of those platforms need to morph into something that [can be bundled].
Bowick (Cox): I think the concept of integration of the bundle is really the next step in all of this, like Wayne said. And we’re trialing universal messaging...and hope to be able to expand that pretty significantly in the next couple of years where you could get voicemail on the PC, and e-mail on the phone, and caller ID to the television set.
Fellows (Comcast): Just like we have a team working on PacketCable for VoIP rollout, we have a team right behind them working on PacketCable Multimedia and the SIP extensions that will allow video telephony and unified messaging, and all of these other things.
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Mediacom was not a participant. What is available re Mediacom from management is that they say they need to partner; and plan to be very aggressive in their voIP rollout. |
