By now it’s clear that the chapter involving CableCards and the retail part of Tru2way is closing, if not closed.

We’ll stop short of “stick a fork in it, it’s done,” because as former National Cable & Telecommunications Association attorney Dan Brenner once quipped, it’s just never a good idea to stick a fork into a piece of electronics.

Here’s how the Federal Communications Commission said it, in its April 21 notice of inquiry (NOI) on multichannel video issues: “We are not convinced that the Tru2way solution will assure the development of a commercial retail market.”

And, from FCC commissioner Robert McDowell: “To be blunt, the CableCard approach … has been disappointing.” Let’s review the facts. CableCards grew out of an FCC mandate that banned (only) cable operators from deploying set-top boxes with integrated security.

So they did. Today, some 18 million boxes are deployed with CableCards, at a cost north of $1.2 billion.

No, the new “AllVid” proposal from the FCC is for an “adapter,” or “set-back device.” The latter is so named not because it’s a setback, of course, but because it sits back. Small, unobtrusive, out of sight.

The FCC’s set-back adapter would handle signal reception, tuning and upstream (home outward) functions. Oh, and conditional access. (Quick translation: On the condition that your account is in good standing, you get access.) So much for that integrated security ban.

The adapter would hook to a different, “smart video” device, which would handle “navigation functions, including presentation of programming guides and search functionality.” That’s a biggie for the consumer-electronics industry: they’ve wanted first-screen navigation for two decades.

If you’re hungry for tech-talk, the 28-page NOI is chewy. Short list of terms to keep an eye on: DLNA, short for Digital Living Network Alliance. It’s the protocol that lets different gadgets connected to an IP network identify themselves on different screens with an icon (e.g., “hi, I’m a TV,” “hi, I’m a PC,” and so on).

Also: DTCP-IP, or Digital Transmission Content Protection/ Internet Protocol, a not-new way to enforce digital rights, using encryption, which most in the video foodchain seem to agree is OK.

Mostly, the NOI asks questions. Lots of questions. (I lost count at 22.) Some of them venture alarmingly deep into the techno-weeds. Citing how devices connected to cable’s switched digital video systems need a way to tell the switch when a viewer stops viewing (true enough), the FCC asks: “What protocols would be necessary for the AllVid adapter to query whether the navigation device still requires access to the program stream?”

That answer, and 21 others, are due back to the FCC in mid-June. Heigh-ho.

In cable, making room for more new stuff is two-pronged.

First is the chronic question of bandwidth: How many slots on the digital shelf can go to more HD and VOD? How many for any new 3D and Internet-protocol TV offerings?

The second prong is the matter of sheer physical space. If you’re the keeper of headends and hubs - heating, cooling, power, rack arrangements, wiring - it’s not a good day when the headend starts looking like the five-pound bag, with another 10 pounds of new stuff on the way.

At issue, in large part, are those impressively nerdy mainstays of digital cable: the QAMs. Quadrature amplitude modulators are necessary to imprint digital signals onto the physical plant, for transmission to subscribing homes.

Pretty much everything needs a QAM in cable, including the new stuff. But up until now, most service categories attracted their own vendors, each with their own QAMs. There are QAM suppliers for video and QAM suppliers for voice and data.

Right now, the densest packing of video QAMs is eight per port. For broadband data, four. Switched digital video? Up to 16. IPTV will need a few to start, then more as the service develops.

Right now, they all exist in isolation. Different racks, different batches of gear.

That’s why the industry’s headend caretakers - led by Comcast - posed this question: Why not make the QAM spigots denser, and more capable of sending information across service categories?

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably hip to a relatively new, Comcast-specific term: “CMAP,” which stands for Converged Multiservice Access Platform. It grew out of another Comcast acronym: “NGAA,” which stands for “Next Generation Access Architecture.”

If you dabble in the cable-modem termination system landscape, this is probably sounding a lot like the “modular CMTS” conversations that dominated the broadband cable scene a few years ago.

This is different, in that it’s a blueprint for gear.

Here’s what CMAP isn’t: It’s not a new version of DOCSIS, nor is it an active CableLabs project. That’s because it’s a product definition, not an interface specification. In other words, it doesn’t mess with how data talks when it moves from one port to another. Instead, it suggests a way to mix and match QAMs for video, voice and data services, in a denser way. 160 of them, per port, with room to grow.

This is at the write-the-specs stage now. They turn into CMAPs as soon as next year, with launches expected the year after. More on this as it develops.

Big doings in Denver this week, especially for the tech-interested. That’s good, because it’s been six months since the last big core dump in cable engineering, and four months since that empty spot, in mid-June, when the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo used to occur.

It’s time for a feast.

If your plans give you a full week in Our Fair City, and you can attend both the CTAM Summit and the SCTE Expo, start on Monday at CTAM with “We Have An App for That! Bringing New Applications to Traditional Devices,” “3D Television: Entering the Third Dimension, Ready or Not?” and “Ringing Toward the Future: Home Phone Market, Technology and Trends.”

Then, don’t miss “Cable’s Consumer Product Agenda,” on Tuesday morning, for the view from an A-list of cable technologists from Bright House Networks (Nomi Bergman), Comcast (Tony Werner), Time Warner Cable (Mike LaJoie) and Rogers (Mike Lee).

For those planning to stay through the SCTE Expo, don’t miss the 8:30 opening on Wednesday, October 28. We have it on good authority that the keynote by John Schanz, EVP of Network Engineering & Technical Operations at Comcast, will be a multimedia abundanza of past (SCTE celebrates 40 this year), present, and future.

Plus, the Expo workshop schedule – which doesn’t repeat this year, heads-up – is right on the money of what’s on engineering minds. If you can’t go, here’s a sampling.

Advanced Advertising: If it’s your thing, but you’re not as hip as you’d like to be about  “SaFI” (pronounced as a word that rhymes with “taffy”), check out the “Advanced Advertising: Making it a Reality” session, on Thursday from 8-9:15.

DOCSIS 3.0 and Wideband: Lots to choose from here. Take IPv6, for instance – the new numbering system for Internet-connected devices. To do this in context, take a count, before you leave home, of all the items in your house that take an Internet connection. (Here in the geekosphere, the count is 16.)

Today’s numbering system for Internet-connected devices – Ipv4 – is redlining. IPv6 expands the number of number of IP-connectable devices to a one with 18 zeros behind it, which is roughly analogous to the number of known stars in our universe. That’s good, but the transition to IPv6 isn’t without challenges.

The SCTE workshop motherlode also hits on how to write applications for EBIF and tru2way; how to engineer for video over IP and “TV everywhere;” how to measure the impact of IP video on capacity planning, and how to get wideband and channel bonding going in the upstream. Aaaaah, details.

For dessert? Make your way toward Golden Gate Canyon, 30 miles west of town. It’s a quick getaway into some Rocky Mountain scenery that will assuredly blunt the stress of such a jam-packed week.

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For such a nerdy, network-y name, IPv6 rides with some pretty colorful language. Without it, for instance, the global Internet faces “IP address exhaustion.” With it, we could theoretically affix an IP address to “every atom on the surface of Earth.”

But getting to IPv6 (from IPv4) won’t be trivial, engineers said over and over during the recent SCTE Cable Tec Expo. (And in engineer-speak, “non-trivial” is several shades darker than “really challenging.”)

Here’s the situation: We’re running out of IP addresses, and pretty much everything needs one. Bad news for any TV, PC or handheld screen craving an Internet connection.

Two entities are the keepers of Internet Protocol addresses: IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. IANA runs dry by the end of next year; ARIN in 2012.

That’s why it’s good that so many IPv6 addresses are on deck – except for the largess of getting backbone, access and in-home networks ready for them. Turns out that the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is … well … non-trivial.

From a consumer perspective, if the bits moving to or from a screen affixed to an IPv6 addresses smack into any gear the route that only knows IPv4, whatever that consumer was looking at won’t load right, at least the first time.

For the caretakers of broadband, going to IPv6 requires careful planning and phasing. (This particular point is consistently bracketed in “I can’t emphasize this enough” admonitions from the engineers working on it.) It’ll seem like a slowdown, or a glitch, and it will happen on the day you hit every red light on the way to work, while feeling like you’re getting a cold.

The transition itself can go down in at least three ways. Safest, from a consumer perspective, is “dual stacking,” which means gear that speaks both v4 and v6.

Or, there’s tunneling, also known as encapsulation, which sidelines into terminology like “6to4,” “ISATAP,” and “Teredo.” All describe different was of making the new stuff look and act like the old stuff.

Also an option: Network address translation, or NAT, which does the opposite – it translates v4 addresses into v6 addresses.

Other, more tactical considerations: Getting the actual IPv6 address allocations; deciding where to start transitioning – core, or edge; picking routing protocols; prepping all back-office functions; and making sure all bases are covered — so that the new, v6 stuff doesn’t put the existing, v4 stuff at risk.

Bottom line, and to quote Comcast’s John Brzozowski, chief IPv6 architect and principle engineer: “This is no one-man show. Everyone in your company has something to do with the success of your v6 program.”

Best get on it.

In case you missed it (I did), the home team achieved two world’s firsts last month, when it comes to getting 3D content into consumer homes.

Both occurred during the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, in a tucked-away CableLabs corner tagged the “3D Pavilion.”

World’s first #1: Sending and displaying two 3DTV channels and 3D-VOD, delivered simultaneously over Comcast’s plant. The 3D signal was live for three days (the duration of the Expo) and was decoded by existing set-tops.

Up until then, 3D vendors brought their own demos, tricked out to make their gear look as good as possible.

The material was 3D-encoded at the Comcast Media Center, using the “over-under” method. That means squeezing the right eye and left eye frames on top of one another, within the same digital channel. An assortment of compression rates and resolutions were sampled – some 720p / 60 frames, some 1080p / 24 frames.

World’s first #2:  Connecting multiple brands of 3DTVs to the same signal, at the same time. Or, put another way, the coexistence of passive and shutter glasses, on the same 3D signal.

Here’s why that matters: Different brands of 3DTVs use different types of eyewear – both “active” (shuttered) glasses, and “passive” (polarized) glasses. Up until now, confusion reigned about whether the same incoming signal could feed TVs that use different types of glasses.

Answer: Apparently so. The demonstration made clear that 3D signals don’t require special formatting for one type of eyewear vs. another. The 3D-TVs can resolve those differences internally.

Closing observation: The amount of progress in 3DTV for home use, even since the SMPTE 3D and Digital Cinema deep-dive in April, is astonishing. What looked to be a “five years out” thing suddenly seems much, much more imminent.  The technical kinks are clearly being resolved.

What’s needed now (in a huge oversimplification): 3D content.