By L. Alberto Campos, Ph.D., Cable Television Laboratories Inc.; Lin Cheng, Ph.D., Cable Television Laboratories Inc.; Dorin Viorel, Cable Television Laboratories Inc.; Eric Nachtigall, Cable Television Laboratories Inc.; Todd Bryan, Cable Television Laboratories Inc.; Chris Stengrim, Cable Television Laboratories Inc.
Since the early days in cable our networks and our systems have been constantly evolving to address our customers’ changing needs, from the early end-to-end one-way coaxial environment for analog video services to a two-way hybrid-fiber-coax (HFC) environment to support data services and then to a fiber deeper distributed access architecture (DAA) to meet the exponential growth in demand for capacity supporting all type of internet protocol (IP) based services for residential and business customers.
Even though it is always hard to imagine what type of applications and services will continue to drive such demand, these growth trends have not subsided. We need to transform our networks to remain a relevant choice to our subscriber base. This paper explores how we, in cable, can continue to address this demand through a comprehensive examination of our architectures and topologies, our distribution network components, our end-devices, our protocols and the way we provide services so that by intelligently evolving them we can continue to leverage our HFC infrastructure. Likewise, this assessment will also be useful in determining under what circumstances an HFC based platform may no longer be practically leveraged and how a transition to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) could be executed alongside our proposed HFC evolution steps.
In this paper we review the capabilities of our network and its elements both current and future. Being this a holistic assessment, all the elements, that may play a role in data-over-cable services, are examined and could be impacted in this proposed evolution.