The Western Show: Triple Play Heard Round the World

"Cable is positioned to be the communications leader," said Ron Hranac, Technical Leader of Broadband Network Engineering with Cisco Systems, speaking on a panel at The Western Show in Anaheim, California. Hranac noted that today's upgraded HFC networks have the potential to deliver over 5 Gbps of bandwidth to and from the home. They also benefit from a stable set of DOCSIS/EURDOCSIS standards, extensive fiber deployments out to the neighborhood, an established base of 15 million cable modem subscribers (U.S. only) and the potential to leverage their extensive entertainment content. Hranac argued that this makes cable the perfect platform for Triple Play. He cited Time Warner's 40% cable modem penetration rate and newly launched VoIP primary line services in Portland, Maine as a role for the new wave of cable competition.


"The focus of the cable industry needs to expand from consumer services to business services," said David Jacobs, CTO of JacobsRimell, said This is especially true in Europe, he said, where direct broadcast satellite has come to dominate the video business and the incumbent telcos have established strong positions in DSL services. In these market, the cable companies must "accept their lot in life" and then focus delivering bundles services to the more lucrative business segment.


The cable industry is poised for tremendous growth in VoIP services, said Gerry Pearce, Manager of Strategic Alliances of Net2Phone's Cable Telephony Division, but financial considerations remain as one of the major impediments to wide scale rollouts. Net2phone is focused on providing an outsourced telephony service for MSOs. Net2phone provides planning and deployment, the softswitching, call management, and a real-time service assurance platform. It also negotiates and provides call termination services on behalf of the cable operator.


Sure, the bandwidth potential of the cable plant is great, said Ji Zhang, President and CEO of Exavio, but most of the capacity is wasted carrying low-quality analog programming. He believes the cable companies need to move fast to all-digital networks, otherwise much of the tremendous investment in upgrading their networks over the past few years will be underused. Exavio is focused on the distribution and storage of digital video. Zhang also observed that the video business in the U.S. traditionally has been all about TV entertainment. He noted that there are at least two other video services that are gaining traction in markets internationally: video information services and educational video services.