We recently concluded another NCTA Cable Show. Despite Boston’s cloudy weather, after hundreds of meetings with our cable service provider customers, the common pain points across the industry are clear. Cutting across geography, subscriber footprint, and budget, were the common challenges of responding to the threat of OTT content delivery, evolving existing infrastructure, and supporting multi-screen experiences.
When we launched Videoscape at CES 2011, we introduced a platform to leverage the inter-networking of cloud + network + client architectures. Videoscape enables our service provider customers to rapidly launch compelling new revenue generating services while transforming the cost structure of their network operations.
It is gratifying to see how our key principles are being appreciated by our MSO customers. We are helping our MSO customers evolve the home environment for their subscribers. This means supporting next generation services across proliferating devices, and bridging both managed and unmanaged device experiences. As our recently updated VNI data shows, the trend towards IP-enabled experiences is Read More »
This year’s Cable Show kicked off with a … well, with a flash mob! First one ever for this event. All very exciting, if you ask me, or the hundreds of other cable onlookers on hand at the Boston Convention Center this morning.
Here’s how it went down: When the Show floor opened yesterday, at 11:00am, attendees mixed it up with 100 or so professional troupe dancers, some dressed in green stretchy suits, head to toe, with signage: “Don’t miss the event of the Show! Imagine Park, today at 11:30am! Be there!” Mysterious.
When Cisco Fellow John Chapman took the Imagine Park stage at about 11:40am, it wasn’t to talk about CCAP, or the future of DOCSIS, or anything else, for that matter – because the green people and flash mobbers took over, in a big way. See for yourself:
But flashmobbing isn’t all we’re doing in Boston to shine the spotlight on the many good things happening in cable technology. We’re also glad to announce our work with Bright House Networks, to help businesses and school districts manage the security risks that come with the “BYOD” (bring your own device) realities of today.
Specifically, we’re working with Bright House to help the nation’s 10th-largest school district, serving 179,000 students, with a cloud-based managed services mix (IP VPNs, security; unified communications to come) to more than 250 sites. More here.
On the floor, do please come by Booth #1453, to check out our brand spankin’ new DS384 line cards, for our RF Gateway 10 chassis. Why you care: 10 cards, each capable of 10 Gbps. Apply one for redundancy, still get 160 Gbps of potential downstream throughput. Hello, full spectrum!
All in, it’s a great cable week in Boston! We’re here ‘til Wednesday afternoon, come on by.
Meanwhile, check out what John Chapman has to say about DOCSIS:
By Mark Palazzo, VP/GM, Cisco’s Cable Access business
As industry vendors, we go into every tradeshow mired in details. From the packed meeting schedules to the booth demos (things go much better when they work…!) to the evening events with customers and industry colleagues, it’s far less glamorous than our non-convention-going friends might think. Right? Then there’s struggle to get the suitcase zipped, with the new tonnage of stuff needing transit back to the office.
It’s only afterwards, with a weekend in between to parse the major themes, that the answers come. I’ve checked in with several Cisco colleagues who were on-site in Chicago for The Cable Show last week. We’re in agreement that if the question is “I saw the whole thing! What happened??” in terms of this year’s blur of a Cable Show, our short list goes like this:
Optimism reigns in cable. In years past, and especially last year, it seemed that a miasma of anxiousness blanketed the cable industry, led by fears of over-the-top video providers – and especially Netflix, as a contender for the industry’s own video-on-demand business. This year, we went into the show fresh with knowledge that Netflix traffic continues to gobble up broadband capacity — yet the sense of optimism amongst service providers was unmistakable. To me, it almost felt like the buoyant good will of the go-go-franchise years, in the late ‘70s. With continued evidence that DOCSIS can see the industry through even the heaviest of bandwidth-heavy times, coupled with significant advancements in both “cloud” and “client” – it’s gratifying, as a vendor company focused nearly entirely on network, client, and cloud! Read More »
By Bart Spreister, Sr. Director, IP Video Systems, Cisco
Today we announced our collaboration with Red Bee Media, an international media management company, to offer broadcasters and media companies the means to provide TV and other kinds of digital media through streaming video players and VOD portals.
That’s kind of a mouthful. Allow me break it down into my top three reasons why this is one of the more exciting deals I’ve had the good fortune to be involved with:
Red Bee is cool, --plain and simple. Those who hang out on the U.S. side of the Atlantic may not have heard much about Red Bee Media before, so let me explain it this way: Imagine going to another country to hang out with your new colleague, who knows everybody and is doing all the coolest stuff in video. Red Bee is that kind of partner. They’re a highly respected TV and media aggregator in Europe, and especially the U.K. For instance, of the five major broadcasters there, Red Bee provides the online portal and client. They’re creative and connected and fun, which is a great combination. Read More »
Contributed By John Chapman, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Cable Access Business Unit, and Engineering Fellow
Earlier this year, as part of CableLabs’ “Innovation Showcase,” in Atlanta, we showed how DOCSIS 3.0-based technologies can gracefully and powerfully scale, if operators were to continue increasing the number of digital channels they place into a DOCSIS bond.
The question we were endeavoring to answer was this: Is DOCSIS dead, or does it have another 15+ years of life in it? The answer is clearly the latter. Why? Because the classification and QoS features in backbone routers (like our recently announced ASR 9000 System) are architected for massive speed, in terms of packets-per-second - and those features will migrate down into cable CMTS gear.
The demo for CableLabs focused on our 3G60 CMTS cards, which bonded 48 downstream channels and 12 upstream channels, using 256 QAM in the downstream, and 64-QAM in the upstream. The result was a 1.6 Gbps downstream pipe, and 300 Mbps upstream. But that was back in February. The bond size was generous, but still partial. When you consider the full spectrum capacity of cable television systems - from 54 MHz to 1 GHz, downstream, and from 5 MHz to 42 MHz upstream - clearly, there’s a lot more breathing room for wideband IP services.
