From the C-Cube board, on the delivery problem:
cableworld.com
OpenCable, the Holy Grail........................
Jokerst said the rollout of digital video was especially important in keeping cable ahead of its competition and that CableLabs OpenCable standardization effort is "the Holy Grail" of making that happen.<i/>
Execs, Technologists Agree on Future Needs
Will digital TV, high-speed data or telephony receive priority?
By Jim Barthold
Amid all the hoopla of mega mergers and concurrent employee and customer shake-ups, the execs, who run the industry's biggest MSOs, told an SCTE Cable Tec Expo engineering conference in Orlando last week that their priorities can be rolled into three things: digital television, high-speed data and telephony, although not necessarily in that order. The technologists, in the next session, replied: can do, can do, can do, in whatever order you want.
"I don't think we have a corporate priority regarding which one is most important," (trying to decide between digital video, high-speed data and telephony) said Jim Robbins, president/CEO of Cox Communications Inc.
The MSOs general managers, however, must make the call in the field because "doing all three at once is chaos."
If he had to choose, Robbins would put more effort into pushing high-speed data services than telephony.
"The Internet product is more important today than the phone is," he said. "We have an advantage today that nobody else really has."
Jan Peters, president/CEO of MediaOne Group Inc. concurred, noting, "The market pressure is around high-speed data. The business is there."
It's a business that may be short lived, warned Peters' CTO, Bud Wonsiewicz, in the second panel, pointing in particular to telco digital subscriber line.
"I'm a satisfied DSL customer for the last year," he pointed out. "When the phone companies get their act together, they can probably reach 60% of the country right off the bat."
That, said Wonsiewicz is a threat that should have cable operators asking, "What kinds of services can help differentiate us over DSL?"
Tony Werner, executive VP-engineering and technical operations and CTO of AT&T Corp. Broadband & Internet Services (AT&T) dismissed the notion that DSL would ever be a viable product, but Alex Best, SVP-engineering of Cox Communications Inc. called it a "competitor in the future."
Today, DSL is "more press than reality," Best added. "I think it's coming. I know they will continue to evolve the standard. I think we need to take them seriously."
It's unlikely though, even with threats like DSL from the telcos and digital video from satellite providers, that the MSOs will develop the kind of single focus vision necessary to fight just one threat when their plates are full with three doable technologies.
Comcast Corp., for instance, is slighting telephony.
"We put all our chips on high-speed data and digital," said Steve Burke, president, Comcast Cable Communications Inc., who added that Comcast "is not in the telephone business."
Burke said that upcoming digital boxes will be able to handle applications that have not yet been considered. "The muscularity of the boxes is way ahead of the muscularity of the system applications," he pointed out.
Naturally, AT&T is concentrating on telephony, although Bill Fitzgerald, EVP-COO of AT&T pointed out the company is "very focused on sustaining and growing the video business."
AT&T bought into the cable business via Tele-Communications Inc. and MediaOneGroup to do cable telephony. The phone company will trial 10 systems this year, using conventional switched circuit technology, although it hopes to move to more advanced Internet Protocol (IP) in the long run.
This year's trials will be the "pilot lights for telephony" said Werner.
Also moving a little further into the telephone waters is MediaOne, which will conduct an IP trial later this year, Peters said, adding, "we have had our eye on IP for some time."
"We're very interested in it," Wonsiewicz concurred. "It isn't ready yet."
Charter Communications Inc., which is growing by leaps and bounds and acquisitions, is "a little bit behind" the others, according to vice chairman Barry Babcock, who said the deep pockets and computer expertise of company owner Paul Allen will help change that situation.
Allen, Babcock said, "has a very long strategic view of things" and is a "true futurist."
To date, however, the priority has been to bulk up Charter to compete on a large scale, causing "a lot of personal disruption" for employees and customers, Babcock admitted.
"It's a very tough thing in the short- term," he conceded.
Nevertheless, he insisted that things will shake out in the long-term and the prospects in the cable industry will continue to blossom.
"Just think about it, you could be in the coal industry or something," he told the assemblage of engineers, adding, "we have a lot more technical positions in our company than we ever have had."
Tom Jokerst, SVP-advanced technology, has a technical position at Charter and seemed clearly pleased at the course his company is taking, using "the beauty, the power of the HFC (hybrid fiber/coax) architecture."
Jokerst said the rollout of digital video was especially important in keeping cable ahead of its competition and that CableLabs OpenCable standardization effort is "the Holy Grail" of making that happen.
Retail, though, will have cable operators "walking a tightrope" as they compete to stay ahead of the competition and yet try to reap the revenues that software developers might siphon off, Werner warned.
"To a certain extent, it's out of our control," admitted Best, who said he was most worried about constantly changing software revisions in his products.
"Every major outage I've had in the last year was due to some new software version when it was downloaded to the box," he pointed out.
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