Top engineer calls for unified network: AOL TW's Chiddix looks to get ready for `everything on demand'

Cable operators have introduced a host of new services in the last decade, from digital video to data to voice, and now it's time to build a network that can accommodate them all and meet future needs as well.

That was the message from Jim Chiddix, president of interactive personal video for AOL Time Warner and keynote speaker at last week's Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers conference in San Jose, Calif., near the heart of Silicon Valley.

What cable companies have done is build largely separate networks for each service--Internet protocol (IP) for broadband data services and Motion Picture Expert Group for digital video, for instance.

But ultimately they need to build one broadband network, probably IP-based, that can seamlessly unite all cable services on one network.

Doing so will require much more than the current Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) standards, even the upcoming DOCSIS 2.0, Chiddix said.

"We need to be thinking beyond that," he said. "What are true broadband services--it really is about video and audio and two-way video and audio. Maybe television over IP, maybe videoconferencing."

A future generation of DOCSIS, for example, should be able to handle functions currently performed by analog television and MPEG.

"Things like changing a channel are a big deal" on a current DOCSIS IP network, Chiddix said. "It's something we do need to spend some time on."

The good news is that the current hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) cable infrastructure is capable of meeting foreseeable challenges, he said.

"We can get 5 or 7 bits per hertz pretty easily through our pipe," he said. "If we just moved data, we could move 4 or 5 gigabits per second to every node, to every neighborhood of whatever size. And that will take us a long way."

A better network backbone would translate very quickly into more revenue for some services, he noted.

Right now, even at the relatively high cost of more than $600 a stream, VOD can be profitable with as little as 4% to 5% usage, or a cost of about $30 per customer. But with a more efficient network, per-stream costs could drop as low as $150, a quarter of current levels.

But cable operators need to be thinking beyond movies on demand, Chiddix said, also warning that subscribers will eventually desire more services.

"Why not everything on demand?" he asked. "Why can't I surf through the channels on my digital cable box, and when I stumble into a show that's in progress, why can't I back up to the beginning? It seems obvious."

And from the operators' point of view, why use valuable bandwidth to carry Home and Garden Television, for example, if no one on a particular node is watching the network? Operators need to build a backbone so sophisticated that eventually all or much of programming will be streamed to customers only on demand.

What that network will consist of, however, is difficult to say. Speakers at subsequent SCTE panels pushed different solutions to the problem.

Guenter Roeck, director of cable video engineering for Cisco Systems, for instance, endorsed an IP network and said cable operators need to run digital video MPEG signals through IP instead of alongside it, as they currently do. A new technology developed by AT&T Labs could help, said Sheryl Woodward, a consultant for the lab, and will allow four times as many bits through current IP networks as operators can currently push.

Charles Dougherty, VP and GM of Motorola's transmission network systems, endorsed Chiddix's unified-network approach. Dougherty was recently in San Jose both to attend the SCTE meeting and to visit recently purchased Synchronous next door. That purchase was made with an eye toward giving Motorola a leg up in building the next generation of networks, he said.

"The way it's been approached as cable networks have evolved, you've added an MPEG network onto the plant, you've added an IP network onto the plant and they've been treated separately," Dougherty said. "We're now to a point where the deployment of these networks is so pervasive we have to look at efficiencies from the bandwidth perspective; from the cost perspective, that will be had by integrating the networks in IP."

How that is done, Dougherty, said, will be the challenge.

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