By Kevin A. Noll, Wesley George, Time Warner Cable and Richard Loveland, Alcatel-Lucent
In recent years, cable operators have realized significant growth outside the traditional residential market. The North American cable industry is set to top $8.5 billion in revenue from offering network services to commercial and carrier customers. In a $130 billion telecom services market, cable operators have plenty of opportunities to continue growing this segment of their business. However, to better compete and realize revenue faster, cable operators need to offer new and innovative services, move them to market faster, simplify operations and significantly increase their rate of customer turn-up while decreasing the time to delivery. This paper will examine how Software Defined Networking concepts and the Cablelabs DOCSIS, L2VPN, and DPoE specifications can be integrated to enable cable operators to realize fully automated end-to-end provisioning of commercial services and dynamic network reconfiguration through a single and simplified provisioning interface.