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Strategies & Market Trends : Cable and Wireless (CWP) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clean who wrote (68)	8/26/1998 9:00:00 AM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 162

Euro battle looms over cable modems Standards fight pits DVB/Davic, MCNS -- August 25, 1998 ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES via NewsEdge Corporation : London - The lines have been drawn in Europe for the beginning of a battle over cable-modem standards between a European-developed version, known as DVB/Davic or DVB-RC, and the U.S.-developed multimedia cable network system (MCNS). The first salvo was fired by U.K. cable operator Cable & Wireless Communications, which has selected MCNS for future set-top boxes, despite the existence of the DVB/Davic cable-modem standard. Cable & Wireless is the first European cable television service provider to commit to MCNS, and some participants are predicting that MCNS will displace the European standard because of its U.S. support, and because it is ahead in terms of chip-set development. Breaking ranks In deciding on MCNS, Cable & Wireless is going against the preference of the European Cable Communications Association (ECCA), a European-wide industry organization, which has selected the DVB/Davic system on behalf of its members. Cable & Wireless is exploiting the fact that use of the European cable-modem standard is not mandatory within Europe, unlike most other aspects of the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) family of broadcasting standards. Cable & Wireless has ordered 100,000 digital cable-TV set-top boxes with MCNS cable modems from Pace Micro Technology plc (Saltaire, England). It plans to begin supplying the boxes to subscribers in limited numbers this year, and to go to a full rollout in the first quarter of 1999. A spokesperson for Cable & Wireless said, "From our perspective, the MCNS standard is far more flexible, and it's a de facto industry standard by weight of support." As well as supporting Internet access through the television, the digital box will provide PC users with high-speed access to the Internet via the cable modem and broadband network. The MCNS cable modem will provide a 27-Mbit/second downstream channel and a 10-Mbit/s upstream channel. On the other hand, ECCA argues that the DVB/Davic system is best suited to the needs of European cable operators because it is designed to work with the DVB system, and provides video and audio broadcasting and data communication as well as voice telephony. The DVB/Davic standard specifies both Internet Protocol and asynchronous transfer mode encapsulated data in the digital MPEG transport stream. It includes quality-of-service differentiation for multitier services and full security and encryption. "There is competition between the two sides," said Gregers Kronborg, chief operating officer of Cocom A/S (Copenhagen), a supplier of broadband access technology. "ECCA is saying that because of the European directive that applies to TV transmissions, they want to use DVB/Davic." He conceded that the European directive isn't mandatory. "I don't think they [the European authorities] will extend the directive to the back channel; it is hard to enforce a directive on equipment that has been deployed. But DVB/Davic is just as available as MCNS," he stressed. Andy Trott, director of engineering at Pace, said, "At the moment there isn't a battle, because DVB/Davic return channel is not available." Trott said that while physical-layer chips are available, the media access control (MAC) for the DVB return channel standard is not. Cocom's Kronborg countered this, saying that Cocom can already supply a MAC implementation for the DVB/Davic cable modem, based on a 32-bit RISC processor, FPGA and memory, and would be demonstrating the system at the upcoming International Broadcasting Convention to be held Sept. 11 to 15 in Amsterdam. Cocom has also announced plans to integrate the implementation in a single chip to make a MAC processor for the DVB/Davic cable modem with Fujitsu Microelectronics. Kronborg admitted that integrating the DVB/Davic MAC could take six months, but he argued that Broadcom, the main supplier of MCNS chips, has also announced a delay of one of the chip components within its chip set. That means both DVB/ Davic and MCNS cable modems should be ready for wide-scale supply early in 1999, he said. Copyright - 1998 CMP Media Inc. By Peter Clarke <<ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES -- 08-24-98, p 53>>