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CABLE'S HOPES OF CREATING NAT'L BACKBONE HIT SNAG
By FRED DAWSON
Cable's ambitions to create a national backbone to unify the industry's high-speed-data networks remain murky.
Unresolved technical issues and intensifying competitiveness within the ranks of the cable industry's high-speed-data providers threaten to undercut the strategic goal of a common nationwide infrastructure.
"This is still a very preliminary idea," said James Chiddix, senior vice president of engineering and technology at Time Warner Cable. "There's a sense that, long-term, we'll evaluate this kind of interconnection."
Industry CEOs who sit on Cable Television Laboratories Inc.'s executive committee have placed a high priority on the project. They view interactivity through a common backbone as central to achieving market scale in just about everything related to exploiting the potential of high-speed data.
MSOs have been especially adamant about the importance of a national backbone to their ability to develop voice- and video-communications services using IP (Internet protocol) technology. But the scale economies also apply to being able to supply the multimedia content that is crucial to broadening consumer demand for cable modems and, ultimately, for OpenCable set-top boxes.
"We all have to be interconnected," said Tele-Communications Inc. chairman and CEO John Malone, in a luncheon appearance at the Western Show in Anaheim, Calif., two weeks ago. "To make our vision a reality, we have to interconnect ourselves with a large-capacity trunking system that supports seamless provision of services on a national basis."
Yet among the people directly responsible for implementing the new high-speed-data technologies, the idea of getting to an agreement on a national backbone remains remote, at best.
"I wouldn't say that there's a very active industry Politboro or skunk works focused on this issue," said Milo Medin, chief technical officer of @Home Network, adding, "We're not working at that level of interoperability at this point."
Leading the initiative is a CableLabs executive committee task force headed by Time Warner Cable CEO Joseph Collins.
CableLabs CEO Richard Green took strong issue with any perception that the Collins-led initiative was on a back burner.
"This is a matter of very high priority within the executive committee," he said.
"Currently, the discussion is in the hands of the technical people," Green added. "Joe is waiting for a report from them before taking further action."
Green expressed surprise that the backbone agenda was not perceived as having a higher profile. But, he acknowledged, "this probably needs to be reviewed."
Collins was traveling and unavailable for comment on the initiative.
The lack of urgency for the project presents a potential danger: The longer the industry waits to address interconnection, the more difficult it will be to overcome the technical barriers that arise as a result of independent decisions made within cable's various high-speed-data services.
For example, Medin noted, @Home and everyone else have chosen to prioritize traffic in their own ways through the mapping of instructions within the header of the IP packet, making it extremely difficult to undo any disparities as ever more customers come on to the networks.
"Will the same bit set in the header of my transmission work with the other guy's bit set?" Medin asked. "Will he allow me to dump his bits and replace them with my instruction set? How do we keep track of and pay for content that crosses into each other's territories?"
One of the crucial aspects of prioritizing and ensuring payments on traffic involves setting the amount of delay to be tolerated during the delivery of a particular class of services -- a latency budget, noted Tony Werner, senior vice president of engineering and technical operations at TCI.
"There are a lot of future services that people find promising that are not covered totally in some of the specifications today," Werner said.
Resolving issues like latency is critical, he said, "so that we have an end-to-end service that's of the quality that we want it to be, whether it's IP voice or another type of IP service."
Much of the concern over whether the industry can achieve an agreement on a single-backbone architecture stems from the mutual disrespect that technicians in each of the major high-speed-data camps evince toward each other's strategies.
Partisans in the newly merged Time Warner Road Runner and MediaOne Express groups fault @Home as being weak on content and "personal computer-centric" in its approach to the market. @Home officials look at their rivals as in-house cable efforts that fall well short of the rigorous computer-networking skills that are needed to make a go of the business.
"Time Warner looks at this business as a content company, but the way that we've looked at it and the way that the consumer looks at it is as a provider of a suite of end-to-end services that fully exploit the potential of high-speed connectivity and distributed-network architecture," said Dean Gilbert, executive vice president for @Home.
"We leverage our infrastructure into providing services that people can really use, no matter where their needs and interests lie," he said.
While officials in the Time Warner/MediaOne camp acknowledged that there will be a need to interconnect with @Home in the future, they made it clear that their priority is on competing. This means using their architecture and various proprietary means of service enhancements to create a more appealing venue for potential cable affiliates and their customers.
"Between the two of us, we're ahead of the collective whole of the @Home group," said Glenn Britt, president and CEO of Time Warner Cable Ventures, in reference to the pace of service rollouts. "To push deep in the market beyond the heavy users [of online services], it's important to have a branded content offering."
Added MediaOne executive vice president Doug Holmes, "Clearly, one of the advantages of our partnership is our ability to bring terrific content to the consumer."
The idea of using proprietary software tools to enhance content is anathema to @Home.
"It's important that people get away from optimizing content to fit one software vendor's metric," Medin said. "As a mass market develops for high-speed content, very few people are going to buy proprietary stuff."
@Home's approach is to "be first out of the gate" with a large enough base of MSOs to work with to persuade content developers not to fall into the "single-metric" camp, Medin said. "We use a standard set of interfaces so that there are no operating system-specific issues affecting you as a user."
While engineers in both camps said "peering" connections of their networks are already under way, such interconnections only support direct exchange of Internet traffic without requiring a handoff to the Internet backbone. Peering does not resolve issues regarding categorization, prioritization and back-office tracking of the traffic.
"We're still trying to figure out what this means," said MediaOne chief technology officer David Fellows. "Is it more than peering? What sort of information has to cross these boundaries between networks in order to gain the advantage with the customer?"
"If all we're looking for is peering, that's a no-brainer," Medin said. "But if we want real interconnection, there are some major issues to work out."
For starters, it's clear that the skunk works at CableLabs will have to gain more visibility among the technical leaders charged with providing the solutions.
Otherwise, the goal of interconnection will remain, as one partisan put it, "one of those high-level visions that never get to ground."
Leslie Ellis contributed to this story. |
