Leslie Ellis's blog

Tools, Tools and More Tools

By: Jul 9 2012 - 1:53pm

More than a decade ago, an MSO executive halted a staff meeting to make this exasperated observation: “Tools, tools, tools - can we just have one meeting where I’m not being asked for more tools? How many tools do we really need?”

At the time, Comcast was AT&T Broadband, and the tool in question related to the monitoring of an “open access” (remember that?) trial.

But the question - how many tools do we really need? - is decidedly evergreen.

The latest case in point is the home network, itself an extension of the HFC plant, with gadgets and screens that live better with signal. And they’re all cross-linked.

Today’s home networks make mixed use of MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance), Ethernet, and Wi-Fi to move stuff around. On top of that, there’s DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), poised to let us share component resources - tuners, hard drives - among screens. And that’s just the IP (Internet protocol) side of the equation.

Here’s how one engine-room guy put it over a fish taco last week: “So in the home you have a QAM set-top that’s pulling video into the home network. And an advanced wireless gateway, handling data and voice. And let’s throw in an IP set-top.

“The IP set-top gets video from the QAM box, but it gets its user interface through the data side.

“A customer calls: Something’s wrong with my set-top. We say, is it a video problem, or a data problem?” (At which point he made the “d’oh!” face.)

Which brings us back to tools. And silos of people - video people, data people, voice people.

One answer getting a lot of play in tech circles is TR-069, where the “TR” stands for “Technical Report.” It’s an outgrowth of what’s now called the Broadband Forum (formerly the DSL Forum; DSL is a telco thing, which might explain why cable’s coming around to it only now).

TR-69 is sort of like an IP-based SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), in that it provides ways to move data back and forth, for purposes of troubleshooting, say, a home network. Or, as the Broadband Forum puts it: “The TR-069 standard was developed for automatic configuration of modems, routers, gateways, settop boxes and VoIP phones.”

Great, right? Yes, if you’re OK with devils and details. While TR-69 can fetch data from different networked devices - assuming they’re plumbed with the right client profile - it lacks the job-specific tools to make diagnostic sense of that data.

What tools are needed? One for bridging into workforce management. One for customer-care reps. Engineering tools, to see what’s going on. And some kind of blended video/data tool, because how things work for QAM-based video are vastly different than how they work on IP-based video.

How many tools? I’d go with “lots.” (And good luck with that.)

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

Inside a Comcast 'AnyPlay' Installation

By: Feb 6 2012 - 3:52pm

Last Monday, a new gadget arrived here in the over-the-top video lab: Comcast’s “AnyPlay” streamer, which makes it possible for triple-play customers to stream live and linear TV to an iPad.What lab, you say? It all started last summer. The point of it is to see, firsthand, how and why everyday consumers visit the “connected” side of connected TVs, and whether the stuff people regularly watch is even available on those other screens and services.

That meant hooking up tons of gear. Panasonic’s “Viera” connected TV, Boxee (live TV dongle on order), Samsung’s connected Blu-Ray player, Apple TV, TiVo, Xbox 360 Kinect, Google TV, and standalone streamers made by Sony, NeoTV and Roku.

If you or someone you know is considering any over-the-top streamer as an alternative to a multichannel-video subscription, do this first: Make a list of what all you watch. Why? Chances are good that everything you watch won’t be available.

That’s where AnyPlay is different - and I’ll say it - better. It’s an extension of the TV programming you already pay for, and because you can only view it when you’re physically tied to the cable modem and router that’s playing it out (which keeps content owners happy), chances are high that on AnyPlay, what you watch is what you watch, just on a different screen.

So far, AnyPlay is on trial in Nashville, Tenn., and, happily, Denver. The install involved the Motorola “Televation” box, developed jointly with Comcast Labs.

It’s a standalone box. No video outputs. Coax in, Ethernet out to the modem/wireless router and voila: television on the iPad. (Droids and other devices to come.)

In tech terms, the box marries the front end of a CableCard-based settop with transcoding (MPEG transport to IP) and digital rights management (DRM).

Signal flow goes like this: Video comes into the box over traditional QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) delivery. It gets decoded and decrypted, then shaped into IP, then wrapped in DRM (Motorola’s “Secure Media”), then streamed over Ethernet to the modem/ router, and from its Wi-Fi spigot to the Xfinity app on the iPad.

The installation involved hooking up the box, making sure the most recent version of the Xfinity app was on the iPad, then enabling the app. (”We found an AnyPlay box! Would you like to enable AnyPlay now for playback on this device?” Oh yes.)

After that, a “play now” button shows up next to the “watch on TV” and “record” buttons on the iPad.

From an Xfinity app perspective, AnyPlay is one in a string of feature additions. It started with DVR settings and snazzier navigation. Now, streaming to tablets within the home. It’s an all-inone app that moves new services to market quickly.

How does AnyPlay compare to the other lab streamers? Put it this way: the lab stuff is in a back room. All those screens, all those services and no TV at the desk - until now! (I expect my quality of work to degrade precipitously.)

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

How Video Slinging Fits in the Upstream

By: Jan 30 2012 - 4:47pm

Last week’s mail contained this query from reader Steve, who asked, “How would slinging video up cable’s upstream path work, given how little bandwidth there is down there?”

He was referring to last week’s column about Broadcom putting Sling Media’s technology into the silicon that goes inside cable modems and set-top boxes.

When available (Q3 of 2012), when included in those devices (TBD) and if activated by service providers, Sling-on-a-chip becomes a potentially pervasive way to stream subscription video to tablets - outside of the home.

Right now, cable operators are contractually obligated to household boundaries in streaming video to screens not connected via the set-top box. That means tablets, PCs and smart phones.

And that brings us to this observation from the Department of Not So Fast: The clash between technology and rights is perennial. We’re living another chapter now. It shows up in these kinds of caveats: “If rights weren’t an issue, the technology part would work like so.”

So, if rights weren’t an issue, what about that upstream path? Quick refresher: Cable’s upstream (or “reverse”) path sits in a tiny slice of spectrum, between 5 and 42 MHz. Compared to the total capacity, downstream and upstream (assuming 750 MHz total), it’s about 5%.

Other upstream basics: That swath of spectrum was never intended to move video, way back when. For that reason, it doesn’t use the 6-MHz spacing common to the downstream (headend-to-home) direction. Instead, it generally uses three widths: 1.2 MHz, 3.2 MHz and 6.4 MHz.

It also uses a mix of modulation techniques: QPSK, 16-QAM and, in really clean plant conditions, 64-QAM. Generally speaking, the higher-order you go in modulation, the cleaner the plant needs to be in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Why: The upstream path is a noisy place. It’s important to be able to downshift to a safer zone, when zapped by noise.

Bonus: That channel-bonding feature in DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems works in the upstream path, too. That means there are ways to staple channels together, to make enough room for video.

Plus, it’s not like “slinging” video would involve moving the entire channel lineup upstream. One stream at a time. Add in MPEG-4 compression? Even better, bandwidth-wise.

That’s a long way of saying that cable’s upstream path, however anorexic, is in reasonably good shape to move a stream of video up and out of the home.

Which brings us back to what one can do vs. what one may do. That’s right! Rights.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve heard the banter about how Sling hasn’t been successfully legally challenged in court. The back-at-ya programmer scoff on that one? A standalone video-slinging device with low penetration is one thing. On-chip with broad penetration is quite different. (Harumph!)

And so, it’s another example of how the technology parts of TV Everywhere are moving faster than the muck of rights.

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog.

2012 International CES Musings, Part Two

By: Jan 23 2012 - 3:46pm

Things were just starting to sizzle at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show when last week’s edition went to press, so here’s a part two on overall observations.When one returns from CES - any CES - the first thing people ask is: “What was the coolest thing you saw?”

This year, the technology food chain is fragmenting, and each fragment is furiously chasing innovation. That means no one big, big thing at this year’s CES (like tablets were last year, and 3D the year before that and HD a few years before that).

Not to worry. There are always ways to clump the trends at CES. Here goes.

Most interesting industry development: Sling Media’s technology inside the Broadcom 7425 chip. Think about this. Sling, on-chip. Chip with Sling, inside set-top boxes (and who knows what else) later this year. To activate the chip, pay a license fee (to EchoStar) for the APIs to access the secret Sling sauce from an app.

Suddenly, that tedious (and wide) legal gap between copyright negotiations and out-of-home video streaming is a little more interesting.

Most lustful, you-so-want-it thing: OLED (organic light-emitting diode) and 4K screens. Remember the first time you saw HDTV? At the time, and compared to analog and standard definition, it seemed better than the eyes could see. And this is better than that. It’s like having an IMAX screen in your house.

Video and television engineers note that for the first time ever in the history of television, TV screens can display more picture information than can be rationally fed into them. In the early days of digital, and even HDTV, extra bits regularly “fell on the floor.” Not so anymore.

OLEDs are still unrealistically expensive - one vendor took a hunch at a sticker price of “under $10,000″ - and 4K for households is even further out, in availability and mainstream pricing.

Still. HDTVs first hit CES in 1998. Mainstream came about five years later. And compared to today’s most gorgeous HDTVs, OLED is thinner, sharper, prettier, lighter and more frugal with power.

(Bandwidth is another issue. Even when compressed with MPEG-4/AVC, 4K video chews up 17 Mbps. Daunting, even for the industry with the coaxial wires.)

Thing I didn’t know existed but want: The Zefyr2 cooler from Moshi. If you spend a lot of time on a MacBook of any size, you know how hot it gets. I use rectangles cut from a silicone potholder, as a heat barrier between the Mac and the heels of my hands.

Crazy other stuff that showed up at this year’s CES: LG’s “Blast Chiller,” a refrigeration innovation. Cools a can of beer from room temperature to frosty mug in five minutes. Bottle of white? Eight minutes.

Speaking of things that go with wine: The QooQ tablet, a slip-proof, spill-proof, single-purpose culinary tablet that can withstand heat up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit (but why?). It is French, which should give some guidance on how to pronounced “QooQ.” (Hint: Say “cook” with a French accent.)

Bon appetit!

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog.

How to Talk Like a Gear Head at CES

By: Jan 9 2012 - 4:53pm

Well, the holidays blew by and the calendar flipped to a new year. This can only mean one thing: Consumer Electronics Show!

If you’re heading there, know going in that tablets and connected TVs will (again) dominate the scene. Beyond that, here’s a lingo guide to the larger CES trends, so that you can maneuver the whole scene with panache.

Let’s start with “OLED.” It stands for “Organic Light-Emitting Diode.” (People tend to say it as its constituent letters, thankfully.)

Think about what you draped around your tree, house or fence this season. LEDs, in general, are in a renaissance.

The “organic” in OLED doesn’t mean anything was grown in biodynamic soil or left to graze out of the cage. In this case, it’s about molecules and polymers, sprayed in layers on semiconductor chips. When electricity is applied, the polymers phosphoresce. (The gear-head way to say it: electrophosphorescence.)

OLEDs aren’t new. Sony and its ilk started showing them off five or more years ago - first with a phone-sized screen, then a laptop-sized screen. Small-ish OLED TVs dotted the CES scene last year.

This year, part of the buzz of the show is LG’s 55- inch OLED - biggest yet.

If you follow CES, you know that 55 inches is almost half the size of the “world’s biggest HDTV!” of years past, when we shouldered in to see the 100-inch-plus doozy on display from Panasonic.

Alas, the “world’s biggest!” hype lost its tech-sexy over the last few years, as reality hit about wall sizes and product weight. (As in: Wow, that is a huge TV - too bad it pulled the wall off your house!)

That’s why OLEDs are hot. They’re substantially lighter, use way less power, and ultimately can be rolled up like a scroll.

Also high on the gear-head meter at this year’s CES: connectivity. (Again.) Why? Vendor ecosystems collide around the best way for consumers to spill video back and forth between screens.

There’s a “DLNA House,” for instance, across from Central Hall, as well as the new-ish DIIVA effort (South Hall, No. 20656), supported by companies like LG, Samsung and Sony. Wi3 Inc. (Venetian, No. 73010) is out with a dongle-like thing that turns any coaxial jack on any wall into an Ethernet and Wi-Fi port.

DIIVA stands for Digital Interactive Interface for Video and Audio. In short, it’s about one cable that does HDMI, USB, Ethernet, power and copy protection.

And don’t forget to drop a little “4K x 2K” talk into your CES conversations. It’s the new-new thing in display resolution - 3840 by 2160 pixels, which is well beyond the 1080-pixel max of today’s best HDTVs. Great for 3D, great for medical imaging. It’s unclear how great that is for everyday TV viewing.

That’s a quick jargon guide for the 2012 CES. And remember, there’s a reason why The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka refers to CES as “Pretendistan.”

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog.

CES 2012: The Connector Cacophony

By: Jan 17 2012 - 4:47pm

LAS VEGAS - A less-glitzy but persistent thread at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show? Connectors. HDMI, USB, Ethernet, you name it. Yes, even in these wireless times, connectors still matter.

As someone who spent chunks of 2011 figuring out how to wire up a pile of over-the-top gadgetry, I can attest: When everything needs an Internet connection, one starts to think more about signals and connectors.

At this year’s CES, a new batch appeared: DIIVA (Digital Interactive Interface for Video & Audio) and MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link).

Technically, MHL, as a specification, isn’t new-new. It turns two this year. It’s backed by a consortium of companies including Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony and Toshiba. The 1.0 version of the MHL spec includes 1080p video resolution, 7.1-channel surround sound and 5 watts of power, over a five-pin connector.

Its original intent: To connect your smart phone to your TV. (Which explains the “mobile” part of MHL.) Use the micro-USB connector on your phone to get to the HDMI connector on your HDTV. Play the stuff on your phone on your TV, using the TV’s remote, and without draining the battery of your phone.

Roku put MHL in the spotlight with a very different use case last week: the “Streaming Stick.” Picture something slightly wider than a thumb drive, which streams over-the-top video. Yes, you need an HD screen equipped with the MHL connector to play.

If this seems counterintuitive to the entire notion of the “smart TV,” think about what 2011-model smart TVs will look like, from an obsolescence perspective, in 2016. A $50-ish stick on a “dumb” monitor is probably more economic than replacing the TV.

MHL availability: now, on lots of phones, tablets and TVs.

Then there’s DIIVA: Another CE consortium, with players like LG, Samsung, and Sony. They’re out with a combo-cable that does HDMI (video), Ethernet (data/Internet) and USB (connectivity and control). It hauls up to 18 Gigabits per second of data, over a distance over about 25 meters. Availability: midyear.

This kind of cable will stoke the home theater community, so watch for more DIIVA developments around their big show, called CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association).

Last but not least: a way to turn the coax jack on your wall into a combo Ethernet/Wi-Fi outlet. Manufacturer Wi3 branded it “WiPNET,” with handouts proclaiming the death of the set-top box: “2012 will write the eulogy for the set-top box, and WiPNET, as they say, will be the final nail.” (As who says?)

The Wi3 sleeves retail for just under $200. Installation looked … non-trivial, as engineers like to say.

CES is always a preview show, often proving the adage about the lack of a difference between “early” and “wrong.” In this case, the timing seems about right.

All of this connectorization will matter more as we head toward six or more IP-connected things in our lives, wanting sips and gulps of broadband - wired or wireless. That should happen within the next year or two.



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog.

The Super Bowl, Shazam and the Future of ACR

By: Feb 13 2012 - 6:22pm

For those of us who watch the Super Bowl for the advertisements, one force outweighed everything else in last week’s folly. Not the doggies (says a dog person); not even Betty.

Shazam, the smart-phone app that your friends showed you five years ago as a way to push a button, hold up your phone and identify whatever song was playing, wherever you are, showed up with gusto at the 46th football extravaganza.

By now you’ve seen or heard about ads from Toyota (win two Camrys!), Best Buy ($50 gift certificate!), Pepsi (free video!), Teleflora (secret offer!) and Bud Light (halftime show with remix of Madonna’s new single!).

Talk about reach and frequency.

Shazam is based on audio content recognition, or ACR. (The “A” in “ACR” goes by “automatic” in the lingo, too.) Its whomp-like force at the game, just as the ACR category is getting going, raises one undeniable question: What now for the ACR technology races? Game over?

To answer that, this week’s Translation looks at some of the dis-or-dat fractures that were fragmenting the ACR scene, even while Shazam was readying its first interactive ad (for Pillsbury, in December).

Let’s list them: TV or tablet; ad or program; watermarking or fingerprinting.

Because the size of the tablet/phone market, so far, is substantially bigger than that of Internet-connected, app-loaded televisions, most of what happened in this year’s game occurred on the latter.

ACR enthusiasts point out that most, if not all, connected TVs sold this year will include some form of ACR - in many cases, on-chip.

or TV makers, because there is no standard for ACR technology, it means due diligence on intellectual property before selecting which technique to license. By my count, there are some 10 ACR contenders from which to choose: Audible Magic, Civolution, IntoNow and Zeitera, to name a few.

The “ad or program” fragmentation is a tough one, because of the pesky matter of monetization. Why make a show interactive if it can’t pay for itself? Yet, if consumers learn that the clickable thing uncovers an ad, will they click when it blinks up on a show?

On the tech side, there’s the dis-or-dat of watermarking vs. fingerprinting. Short version: Watermarking inserts code into the signal. The app on the other end extracts the watermark to sync the interactivity with the show. Fingerprinting extracts info from the stream, compares it to a big external lookup table, then syncs the interactivity.

This is not to say that Shazam is without challenges. As Live Digitally’s Jeremy Toeman pointed out: “The viewer must grab their phone, turn it on, unlock it, switch to the Shazam app, and then - this is important - get everyone in the room to be quiet for 7-10 seconds.”

Nonetheless, as Super Bowl champions go, Shazam is pretty much it, this year. What does this mean for the large contingent of ACR contenders? Better up the A-game (pun intended).

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

For The Love of Broadband

By: Feb 21 2012 - 7:07pm

Gobs of data last week about broadband usage and trends: AT&T’s blog about network strain; Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index; fresh data from Oolaya about video streaming; and even a kerfuffle between Korea Telecom and Samsung over connected TVs and broadband usage.

Whatever the relationship, it seems the week of the love holiday now coincides with a lot of observations from a lot of places about how we’re using broadband.

And that’s not counting the rapid rise of in-the-background, machine-to-machine computing that’s going on within your machine, even as you read this: Software updates, anti-virus activities, cookie-passing.

Again we ask: Is there a need for some sort of Energy Star-ish focus on broadband usage, to at least establish best practices for machine-to-machine computing? Clearly, this trend of ridiculously fast growth in wired and mobile broadband usage isn’t going anywhere but nutso.

Let’s take them one by one. First, AT&T senior executive vice president John Donovan posted a dramatic Valentine’s Day blog, citing a 20,000% increase in wireless data usage over the past five years.

“Running year-end numbers that show the same results as previous years is typically a sign of stability,” Donovan wrote. “But when the year end numbers show a doubling of wireless data traffic 2010 to 2011 - and you’ve seen at least a doubling every year since 2007 - the implications are profound.”

Cisco’s ongoing work to quantify broadband usage is predictably fat with data. Highlights: More smart phones than humans on earth by the end of this year, consuming an average of 2.6 GB per month; video will represent two thirds of the world’s mobile data in four years.

Then there’s Ooyala, which describes its work as “video analytics technology that measures viewer engagement in real time.” It also posted a meaty usage update last Tuesday. Upshot: People are watching more video on more screens for longer periods of time. The bigger the screen, the longer the dwell.

Meanwhile, over in Seoul, Korea Telecom got so bent out of shape by the high broadband usage amongst Samsung’s connected TVs, they cut off access. “KT insists smart TVs share the costs of quality maintenance of the Internet as they tend to hog the networks, while TV makers argue they have no obligation to do so,” reported the Maeil Business Newspaper.

The Samsung/KT scuffle is by far the most interesting of the bunch. Imagine the uproar, if any service provider here were to cut off any device, on the basis of usage hoggishness!

Nonetheless, even with all this video connectivity, to all these screens, we are still a distracted bunch. Ooyala’s data showed that tablet users were “45% more likely to complete three-quarters of a video than viewers who watched on a desktop.” So if you’re preparing anything in video, don’t bury the lead.



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

On Leaps and DASHes

By: Feb 27 2012 - 3:00pm

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, each video asset necessarily becomes a file that is chunked into different sizes, rather than a linear stream of contiguous bits. Bandwidth cornucopia, send biggest file size; bandwidth anorexia, send smallest file size.

DASH stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Over HTTP. So, a nested acronym. “HTTP” stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the underlying language of the World Wide Web. (For the advanced class - the standard also goes by “ISO/IEC 23009-1.”)

MPEG’s video roots are deep and respectable. Nearly all digital video you see on big (TV) screens today is compressed with MPEG-2, and delivered using MPEG transport. Medium (PC, tablet) and small (smartphone) screens commonly use a more recent form of compression, known as MPEG-4. So, it is understandable and good that the global MPEG brain trust is working on ways to continually improve the mechanics of video.

What problem(s) does MPEG DASH aim to solve? Let’s start with fragmentation. If you make and distribute professional video content, you’re already working the online/TV Everywhere/IP side of the chain with more than one technique. Probably more than two: Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Adobe’s Dynamic Streaming are the biggies.

Alas. All three are nearly identical, yet incompatible - a phenomenon that tends to happen when different technologies are vying for the lead, so that they become the ultimate open standard.

MPEG DASH (pronounced as the letter “M” followed by the spoken words “peg” and “dash”) hopes to assuage this. Generally speaking, it has two parts: the encoded audio and video streams, and a manifest file that identifies those streams to the client screen. DASH supports trick modes (pause, fast-forward, rewind), ad insertion and an assortment of codecs (H.264, WebM). It will be ready for deployment by midyear.

(Total aside: I am dictating this column using speech recognition software, because of an injury to my left hand. The speech recognition software keeps making a literal dash mark (-) everywhere I want to use the word “DASH.” The lesson here? Please take extra care of your appendages around all glass objects in your life.)

Unresolved issues? Intellectual property, of course. Remember MPEG-LA, which collected royalties for intellectual property in the first digital video heyday? Royalties will come into play this time around, too.

Also: Digital rights management, or DRM. While DASH does not specify a DRM, it supports certain DRM techniques as specified in other standards (namely ISO/IEC 23001-7 common encryption).

And: Whether major browser providers will incorporate DASH into their going-forward roadmaps - especially if royalty payments are involved.

As far as the big players go, MPEG DASH is supported by contributors including Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Netflix, Qualcomm and others. However, there is a difference between being a contributor and an adopter.

That’s the latest on adaptive bit-rate streaming and MPEG DASH. And happy Leap Year to you!
Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

DPoE, EPoC: What's It All About?

By: Mar 5 2012 - 3:35pm

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 “ee-pock”), and stands for Ethernet PON over Coax. So, another nested acronym; PON stands for “passive optical network.”

That nested PON is what links EPoC as a cousin to “DPoE” (DOCSIS Provisioning over EPON,” where the “E” in “EPON” is Ethernet). We’ll get to that.

Generally speaking, EPON is a big deal in the business-services marketplace as a way to install low-cost, high-volume gear for symmetrical, multi- Gigabit-per-second services.

EPoC, as a variation, supplants the fiber necessity of PON with coax. It says, “I don’t need fiber to the anything (basement, building, house). Instead, I’ll convert that optical signal into a bidirectional electrical signal, then send it over coax to multiple end points.”

Think of it in an apartment sense. Fiber to the building, coax in the walls. Something was needed to adjoin what came in over glass, to coax. In a cable sense, that’s DPoE - a way to spoof the DOCSIS back-office components into thinking that an optical transmitter (a PON term) is a CMTS, and an optical receiver is a cable modem.

Then take a big step back. Instead of fiber to the building, then to apartments; fiber to a node serving 500 homes. Put that optical-to-electrical converter there, right where light is being converted to RF already. That’s EPoC.

Sounds great, you say. Where does it go spectrally? It’s not exactly like today’s cable operators are brimming over with available bandwidth.

Good point, and welcome back to the oldie-but-goodie about widening the upstream signal path. All such discussions trigger decisions about the fielded base of amplifiers and “passives” - gear that passes signal without needing electricity. Like like taps and splitters. As little futzing as possible is always a design goal there.

One school of EPOC thought moves the upper boundary of the upstream band to 200 MHz from 42 MHz. Including spectral padding to prevent cross-modulation, that lands the downstream signal path at 250 MHz to 1 GHz.

Then, attention must be paid to what’s already sitting in the spectral areas within the change zone - 42-200 MHz, in this scenario. Lots of digital set-tops are wired to receive command-and-control signals (guide data, etc.) at a specific location within that region, for instance (122 MHz).

Watch for this one, and DPoE, to get louder this year, in your broadband engineering circles. DOCSIS 4, EPoC, whatever it’s called, something like it is coming, and it’ll move the needle again for broadband speeds.

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

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