Cable Engineers Seek Ways to Ease Bandwidth Crunch
HOUSTON -- Concerned about soaring consumer bandwidth use in recent years, cable technology strategists quit griping and started addressing a bandwidth shortage expected to hit their industry soon. Speaking at this week’s Society of Cable Telecom Engineers (SCTE’s) conference here, cable operators and tech vendors said they plan to boost bandwidth by dividing fiber nodes, deploying switched digital video technology, trying new channel-bonding techniques and expanding system capacity to 860 MHz or even 1 GHz.
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Engineers are weighing quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) system upgrades, putting in spectrum overlays, shifting to new MPEG-4 video compression standards and other steps, they said. They're even starting to consider such previously-unheard-of ideas as extending fiber all the way to subscriber homes and adding passive optical networking (PON) architecture to networks, just like such big phone rivals as Verizon.
“We know there’s a need for more bandwidth,” Bob McIntyre, chief technology officer (CTO) of Scientific- Atlanta, said: “We just have to decide how to do it.” McIntyre and others at a pre-show seminar sponsored by PK Worldmedia said they need to act as skyrocketing bandwidth consumption by subscribers threatens to overwhelm even the industry’s biggest, fattest broadband pipes.
“Bandwidth consumption is definitely increasing and the average consumption rate is definitely increasing,” Patrick Knorr, gen. mgr. of Sunflower Broadband, a small, independent cable operator based in Lawrence, Kan., said: “There’s definitely a storm coming.”
Speakers traced the pending crunch at least partly to the swiftly growing popularity of HDTV sets and channels. They noted that HD channels use 3-4x as much bandwidth as standard DTV channels, leaving relatively little room for other fare on cable systems straining under 80-plus analog channels.
Rivals like DirecTV and Verizon are angling to outflank the cable industry by loading up with HD programming, said panelists. DirecTV, for example, plans powerful satellites to beam hundreds of HD channels to satellite TV subscribers. “Video is going to drive this thing and keep driving it,” McIntyre said: “We know we're going to have to compete.” He estimated that cable operators will need to support 40-50 linear HD channels by 2009, up from just 10-20 channels today.
Panelists also blamed the stunning increase in Internet video use the past 2 years. They especially cited YouTube, which now downloads 120 million video streams per day, draws more than 34 million unique users per month to its Web site and accounts for nearly 30% of the online multimedia market.
Looking past YouTube’s immediate impact, Jeff Binder, senior dir. of Motorola, predicted major broadcasters could soon pose an even greater threat to the cable industry’s video business model. He cited CBS plans to stream prime- time shows on the Web free a day before they debut on TV. “It’s not so much that everyone is rushing to the Web to watch TV but that content providers are shifting that way,” he said. He advised cable operators to “prepare your networks for the prime-time on-demand wave.” The alternative, he warned, “is to be crushed by the wave.”
Sunflower Broadband’s Knorr, whose 40,000-subscriber system serves the hometown of the U. of Kan., sees evidence that younger watchers prefer downloading Internet video downloads to taking traditional cable service, he said. In Lawrence, he noted, 5,000 of the system’s 40,000 subscribers take only high-speed data service. “Customers are using the Internet more hours per day,” he said: “There’s an absolute risk of people dropping basic video service for Internet video.”
Video-on-demand (VOD) services, digital video recorders (DVRs) and other time-shifting techniques are also chewing up bandwidth, engineers said. Dom Stasi, CTO of TVN Entertainment, said his company now supplies 3,500 hours a month of VOD programming from 130 content partners to cable operators, up from 150 hours per month 6 years ago. “There'll be a huge amount of content coming down the pike,” he said.
As a result, some tech executives believe cable operators may face a permanent bandwidth shortages. They argue that the industry constantly will have to augment capacity to satisfy customers’ appetite and keep satellite and telco competitors at bay. “There will always be a need for more upgrades,” McIntyre said: “We are always going to need more bandwidth. There will never be enough.”