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Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals
In Perspective: Flexinets
June 5, 2013 11:39 pm | by Brian Santo | Articles | CommentsWhen people watch video on cellular networks, the meter is running, and that’s a severe inhibitor to increased consumption. Wireless carriers are understandably reluctant to stop running the meter. So what to do? Subsidize the minutes, somehow - an idea ESPN has been floating.
Open Mic: Taking the tethers off of TV Everywhere services
June 5, 2013 11:25 pm | by Michael Willner | Articles | CommentsThere is one more big challenge - TV Everywhere isn’t really everywhere is it? Unfortunately, if you’ve got a TVE app on your iPad, you still can’t access all those great shows and movies in lots of places. You’re out of luck if you’re traveling or simply not connected to a high-speed pipe, as is the case for most of us many times a day.
Engineering-wise: Time for the Time Domain
June 5, 2013 11:10 pm | by Daniel Howard | Articles | CommentsIt’s time for upstream engineers to start thinking in the time domain as well as the RF spectrum domain. We can use time domain data to maximize our upstream capacity and robustness as we load up the upstream with DOCSIS 3.0 carriers, turn on S-CDMA, and/or prepare for OFDM in DOCSIS 3.1. The good news is that there are lots of options for how to get that data.
Memory Lane: Cable then and now – halfway home
June 5, 2013 11:05 pm | by Stewart Schley | Articles | CommentsA tipping-point moment in cable television history happened sometime in the fall of 1987, when the industry’s presence among U.S. homes topped 50 percent for the first time. The achievement produced legitimate cause for celebration, as an industry that had spent its first three decades struggling to survive could now effectively claim to be the dominant medium for television reception in the country.
New Products: Sonus, Digital Rapids, Averna/Pace
June 5, 2013 9:11 pm | by CED | Articles | CommentsSonus Networks has upgraded its session border control (SBC) portfolio with software and hardware enhancements; Digital Rapids recently started shipping version 3.8 of its the Digital Rapids Stream software; Averna has forged a design-validation partnership with Pace that it said would accelerate customer premise equipment certification (CPE) for cable operators.
Usage-based service management
June 5, 2013 8:38 pm | by Stephan Collins and Bob Hunt | Articles | CommentsThe profitability of fixed broadband service providers is being threatened by the tremendous growth in residential broadband Internet usage. MSOs could restore diminishing residential broadband profitability by moving to a model that matches usage to service tiers.
Conax offering SDK for PlayReady DRM client
June 5, 2013 2:25 pm | by Brian Santo | News | CommentsDevelopers can use the SDK to create a client capable of secure delivery of video content from the streaming server to the native player of the client device. The Conax security-hardened implementation for MS PlayReady fully conforms to Microsoft’s rules for Compliance and Robustness and is developed according to Conax’ security requirements including security requirements from major Hollywood studios and content providers.
Grand unification for home networking standards
June 5, 2013 2:19 pm | by Brian Santo | News | CommentsManufacturers of gear that operate on a grab-bag of networking technologies – HomePlug, MoCA, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet – are setting up a certification system for a new category of home networking equipment that will make all four networking approaches interoperable. The result should be a boon for service providers setting up whole-home services.
Casa Systems tallies another CMTS win
June 5, 2013 2:09 pm | by Brian Santo | News | CommentsFinland’s largest cable operator, DNA Ltd, has placed an order for Casa Systems’ C10G chassis. The C10G is the predecessor to the vendor’s purpose-built CCAP system, the C100G, but the use of C10G allows DNA to offer scalable broadband services to its more than 600,000 subscribers, while giving the operator a clear upgrade path to CCAP.
Comcast combines CMC, IP Services, into Wholesale unit
June 5, 2013 2:05 pm | by Brian Santo | News | CommentsComcast announced the reorganization of several operations dedicated to managing services on behalf of customers, essentially by folding the previously separate IP services operation with the Comcast Media Center under an umbrella unit called Comcast Wholesale. Comcast Wholesale now incorporates CMC units including Content Solutions, HITS and AdDelivery, with the IP Services unit, which provides data and voice services.
The Cable Show hosts job fair for military personnel
June 5, 2013 12:35 pm | by Mike Robuck | News | CommentsThrough a partnership with Hiring our Heroes, the cable industry will host a job fair at next week’s Cable Show in Washington D.C. for military veterans, reservists and military spouses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, in partnership with NCTA, the Cable & Telecommunications Human Resources Association (CTHRA) and other local and industry partners, is conducting the hiring event.
Sigma Systems gives voice to Cable Bahamas’ residential subscribers
June 5, 2013 12:27 pm | by Mike Robuck | News | CommentsCable Bahamas has tapped Sigma Systems to help provision its residential voice services throughout Nassau, Grand Bahamas, Abaco and Eleuthera. Cable Bahamas is using Sigma Systems’ service fulfillment solutions to automate the provisioning of its SIP-based residential VoIP service
Visible World, FourthWall Media draw a bead on targeted ads
June 5, 2013 12:23 pm | by Mike Robuck | News | CommentsTargeted TV ad developer Visible World and interactive TV vendor FourthWall Media announced this morning that they have joined forces to create an addressable advertising platform for one-to-one set-top box targeting. FourthWall is extending the capabilities of its EBIF platform to support Visible World's addressable advertising offerings.
Edgeware feature replaces load balancers
June 4, 2013 1:56 pm | by Brian Santo | Product Releases | CommentsThe company's Origin Selector option for its Distributed Video Delivery Network (D-VDN) Solution provides scalable load balancing and redundancy across multiple video origin servers, located in either the service provider’s own headend or in an external content provider’s network. The Origin Selector option in the Edgeware D-VDN Solution enables intelligent distribution of content collection requests over multiple origin servers, obviating the need for load balancers.
Rovi releases SDK for adding HEVC codecs
June 4, 2013 1:50 pm | by Brian Santo | Product Releases | CommentsThe SDK includes the company’s patent-pending Smart Adaptive Bitrate Encoding Technology (SABET), which enables the generation of as many as ten simultaneous output streams from a single source, reducing CPU cycles by utilizing common encoding processes across all levels, Rovi explained. This facility should help lower the costs and reduce the time required for the mass transcoding of large video content libraries to HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding).
