Translation Please
Stumped by tech gibberish? Veteran technology analyst Leslie Ellis translates the latest in broadband gadgetry, services, bandwidth, and gear.
Your 2012 Cable Show Jargon Descrambler
It’s Cable Show week in Boston, and technology is once again driving what’s been a pretty massive slate of improvements and launches, just since we all got together last year in Chicago. Expect jargon; use this handy descrambler for bearings. In no particular order: “BYOD” means “Bring Your Own Device.” It’s long been a lament of IT people, what wit ...... Read More
Comments (0)Wireless Trends, HotSpot 2.0
Last week’s industrial spotlight shined on the wireless community, which convened in New Orleans for its annual show: CTIA, for Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. Perhaps not surprisingly, what’s hot in wireless parallels what’s hot in wired: That giant slurping sound that is consumer broadband usage. On the eve of CTIA, Sandvine, a consistent counter of bandwid ...... Read More
Comments (0)3D + 4K = 3DTV Without Glasses?
In the stuttered timeline that is 3D television, a new potential intersection of technologies is giving engineers reasons to hope for an eyewear-free viewing environment. The hope is this: that the extra resolution that comes with “4K” video could eventually obviate the technical difficulties associated with “autostereoscopic” 3D viewing on TV. Translation: Autostereosc ...... Read More
Comments (4)What's Up: Interesting Tech Stuff Roundup
Spring is a good time to pull up, look around, and regroup around the boatload of interesting stuff that’s happening in cable tech circles. In no particular order, here’s my list, culled from various batches of notes: 1. Fiber shortage? Hard to imagine, given the fiber glut left in the wake of the cratered competitive local-exchange carrier business. But that was a few years ago. Thi ...... Read More
Comments (0)Somebody Please Bring HD Voice to The U.S.
Writing about something you have to hear to believe is as vexing, if not more, than writing about what you have to see to believe. But even that comparison is a start. Let’s assume that we all lived through the first days of HDTV. (Mine were at the Atlantic City Convention Center, on the boardwalk, in the early 1990s. The booth was draped in black cloth to keep the viewing area dark enough. ...... Read More
Comments (5)Inside the Comcast RDK, Part Two
This week’s Translation steps further into the parts of the Comcast “RDK” (reference development kit), the software effort aimed at shaving a year off the time it takes to launch new cable gateways, hybrid set-tops and all-Internet protocol hardware and services. Quick refresher: RDK is a bundle of software drivers and source code that gets preloaded into chips so manufacture ...... Read More
Comments (0)A Deeper Dive on Set-Tops, Power Use
Nothing like a TED quote to launch a deeper dive into recent news around energy-efficient set-top boxes. It’s from Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT, and it goes like this: “If we’re going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can’t just conserve our way out. We can’t just drill our way out. We can’t bomb our w ...... Read More
Comments (4)A New Path to Moving Faster: Comcast’s ‘RDK’
On the scale of winces, the query that redlines to instant grimace for cable engineers is this: Why does it take so long to get new TV services to market? Lots of reasons, but this week’s translation will hone in on the silicon part of the equation. Right now, after an MSO asks for new features at the silicon level, they wait for samples. After that, they wait, for those chips to be built i ...... Read More
Comments (3)EBIF in the Wake of Canoe Shakeup
Over the past few weeks, since the dramatic resizing of Canoe Ventures, one question keeps coming up, over and over (and over). It is this: In a world with a much smaller Canoe, what happens to EBIF? Is it - gasp - dead? Since EBIF was invented in 2005 as a way to shoehorn more interactivity into legacy (read: older) digital set-tops, this column has drilled into it 26 times. And this is unlikely ...... Read More
Comments (6)On Making Set-Tops Use Less Power
And now this, from the Department of Every Little Bit Counts: The United States currently produces about 81% of its own energy, up from 70% in 2005, according to a piece in last Monday’s All Things D. How did that happen? More domestic oil production, more efficient cars, stricter mileage standards … and, all across the consumer electronics world, a renewed resolve about sleep modes ...... Read More
Comments (0)DPoE, EPoC: What's It All About?
DOCSIS, the cable-modem specification, is a teenager this month (turning 13 on March 20), which made us wonder about the road map for the industry’s most successful interoperability maneuver. Namely: We’re up to version 3.0. Is there a DOCSIS 4.0? Answer: Maybe not by that name, but one just-as-sexy (ahem) acronym is making steady inroads. It goes by “EPoC” (pronounced ...... Read More
Comments (0)On Leaps and DASHes
This being the week of leap year, it seems timely to check in on DASH, the standards subset of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) focused on making a one-size-fits all way to do adaptive bit-rate video streaming. Refresher: Adaptive bit-rate streaming exists to “right-size” a video asset for the screen that wants to play it, depending on available bandwidth. In right-sizing, ea ...... Read More
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