HOUSTON — Cable operators had better grow more familiar with the tools and techniques available to them when it comes to bandwidth management, because there’s probably never going to be enough to go around as more and more capacity-eating services continue to emerge and converge.
That was one big message delivered Tuesday morning by Bob McIntyre, the chief technology officer of Scientific Atlanta, and the opening keynoter for the pre-ET “The QAM Before The Storm” conference put on by PK Worldmedia.
“We’ve been in the middle of the storm for some time,” he said, referencing how usage patterns and new services are impacting cable spectrum.
Just on the Web alone, video-sharing phenom YouTube is channeling 120 million video downloads per day, while another 60 million blogs surface each month. Social networking sites are absorbing capacity by the boatload, as well. My Space, for instance, accounts for 4.5 percent of all hits in the U.S., while Facebook.com is welcoming 20,000 new accounts every day.
As far as more traditional video services go, HDTV, digital video recording and time-shifting are super-charging the category.
“Video has a new energy and a new enthusiasm,” McIntyre said, noting that half of SA’s set-top shipments are equipped with HD and DVR capabilities.
While cable is expected to have enough bandwidth to support in the range of 10 to 20 linear HD channels today, it will have to support as many as 50 by 2009.
The good news: Short of fiber-to-the-home, HFC is the best two-way broadband delivery system in the world, he said.
But that doesn’t mean that operators won’t need to adjust, tweak and perhaps expand on what’s out there today.
With the installations of fiber deep architectures and digital video compression now in the rearview mirror, McIntyre explained that operators must now leverage a number of tools in the toolkit to keep their networks humming, optimized and prepped to stay ahead of the bandwidth curve. Those tools include bandwidth-conserving tweaks such as switched digital broadcast, node splits, QAM upgrades and closed loop encoding. Yet another option is expanding bandwidth to 1 GHz.
Such solutions, he said, can be customized based on the needs of the operator. But key to this is ensuring that operators see what’s ahead and that they are prepared to optimize their HFC plant so it is capable of supporting and introducing new services at a rapid clip.
With that in mind, operators must recognize “that we are going into a storm…perhaps a perfect storm,” he said.
