Cable Confronts Bandwidth Crunch

Alan Breznick (1.24.09)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115344&site=cdn&WT.svl=news1_1

Cable companies are finally recognizing impending bandwidth limitations, and gathering resources to address the problem.

Cable operators are now drawing up plans to boost capacity at both the headend and plant levels. Instead of debating whether the coming bandwidth crisis is genuine, they're looking at ways to confront the crisis by splitting fiber nodes in half, converting systems over to more efficient switched digital video delivery, testing pre-Docsis 3.0 channel-bonding technologies, and expanding their systems' RF capacity to 860 MHz or 1 GHz.

Cable technology strategists are also looking at boosting their QAM power, instituting out-of-band spectrum overlays, and upgrading to MPEG-4 video compression standards. They're even weighing such previously unthinkable moves as building fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks and adopting PON architecture, just like some of the big phone companies.

At a conference sponsored by PK Worldmedia Inc. in Houston Tuesday, found that increasing bandwidth consumption is threatening to overwhelm even their fastest broadband piplines. Conference speakers also noted that such prime cable rivals as DirecTV Group Iinc. and Verizon seem determined to outflank MSOs by offering several dozens or, in DirecTV's case, even hundreds of HD channels to their customers.

Dom Stasi, CTO of TVN Entertainment Corp., pointed out that his company now supplies 3,500 hours a month of VOD content to cable operators, up from a mere 150 hours per month in 2001.