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Open Access - The Freedom to Choose
Introduction to open access for cable networks
By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your
feedback
is important to us!)
Created: July 28, 2000
This article is
the first article in a 5 part series on open access. This series includes: Overview, Connectivity Management, Service Management, HFC Management, and Transparency.
Broadband
operators faced with opening their networks stand to encounter several extremely complex
obstacles. The focus of this article (the first in a series on open access) is to provide
an overview of open access. We will define open access, introduce its essential
components, and discuss the up coming challenges that broadband operators will face in
implementing it.
Open Access Introduction:
The basic concept of open access is
to provide individual broadband customers with a choice of service providers. The term
‘service provider’ represents a supplier of some content (information and/or
entertainment) or connectivity service. From here on out a service provider represents any
company that can utilize the broadband media to deliver some service directly to
customers. The breath and scope of content and connectivity services available are limited
only by ones imagination. This is especially true as the amount of bandwidth available
between the service provider and the customer increases.
Figure 1.0 Simplified View of Open
Access
>Figure 1.0 represents a simplistic
view of what open access offers broadband customers. Open access will afford each
broadband customer the opportunity to choose those service providers that best meet their
needs.
Figure 1.0 can be further broken down
into the components shown in figure 2. This shows the major areas of challenge with regard
to open access. They are basic HFC connectivity, connectivity management, and service
management. Basic HFC connectivity in a completely open access environment goes beyond
today’s single frequency pair. Basic HFC connectivity in this case represents a
spectrum of bandwidth dedicated to open access and managed by the broadband operator. This
bandwidth permits the guaranteed delivery of one or more subscribed services to every
broadband customer. Connectivity management represents the low level switching and routing
necessary to permit various service providers to deliver diverse connectivity options that
do not interfere with one another. Lastly, service management administers the resulting
array of service options that will be available for customers to subscribe, the
presentation of these options to broadband customers, and the subscription changes to
their respective service provider. Of the three components, service management represents
a green field business area with few (if any) shipping products.
Figure 2 Major components of Open
Access
Note open access means more than
simply allowing customers to access the Internet as today’s high-speed data (HSD)
over cable service provides. Open access means freedom of choice for all types of
information and/or entertainment services via the broadband media. Choice implies
competition and its competition that drives innovation, diversity, and value – all
good things for broadband customers. Figure 3 expands on the management components of
Figure 2 by showing various possibilities that open access could bring customers of
broadband services. The management components provide an organized and fair selection of
service & connectivity options.
Figure 3 Management Components of Open
Access
While the advent of open access
promises to bring nothing but good things to its customers, the challenges faced by
vendors and broadband operators to implement open access are extremely steep. In fact,
many of the components required to completely implement an open broadband system do not
yet exist to this day. Among these challenges include:
Challenges and New Roles for Broadband Operators:
Lack of Bandwidth
As the model of open access gains
more popularity, traditional broadband operators will grow ever more limited as they
continue supporting analog video along side new digital services. This is because it is
too expensive for them to reclaim the bandwidth used by these analog systems as it would
require their analog customers to return their set-top-boxes (STB) in favor of a digital
STB (or equivalent). In the mean time, new broadband operators (perhaps those who have
overbuilt HFC to compete with traditional broadband operators) can maximize their use of
the available bandwidth without giving up some of their best frequency spectrum to analog
services. Until traditional broadband operators can rid themselves of supporting analog
video, new broadband operators will enjoy a significant advantage. They will have a more
than twice the available bandwidth (of traditional broadband providers) to deploy new
services. In contrast, traditional broadband operators must squeeze everything they can
out of the new bandwidth made available as a result of upgrades – those that have not
yet upgraded cannot offer any new services without taking something away from their
existing analog customers. Thus the problem of getting rid of analog video may slow or
reduce the number of services that can be offered in open access market.
Bandwidth Efficiency
A customer watching a video program
on 6MHz analog channel throws away the rest of the available spectrum on a 870MHz system.
Meaning, on an analog system if you are watching a program on one channel all the other
programs running on other channels are still being received – they are just not being
watched (tuned). This does not take into account the inefficiency inherent in using a full
6MHz for viewing a single video program. Bandwidth is needlessly wasted in analog systems
and this wasted spectrum is often some of the best quality bandwidth that broadband
operators have as it is usually the least prone to interference. In contrast, a higher
quality digital video channel requires only a fraction of this bandwidth – as many as
16 could occupy the same bandwidth as a single analog video channel. Additionally,
broadband operators also broadcast channels that are rarely watched. In fact, a high
percentage (as much as 30-40%) of a broadband operator’s content are viewed by less
than 1% of their customers. This is the result of concessions made to obtain various
franchise agreements as well as how certain video channels are packaged. If progress is to
be made in making broadband more bandwidth efficient, some mechanism is needed to
distribute content only where it is subscribed. Video On Demand (VOD) is the ultimate
application of this but it is only designed for single, well defined programs and not
continually running events (e.g. a 24 hour news channel). Products are needed to allow
broadband operators to route more content to each customer or distribution hub rather than
broadcast everything to everyone.
Fresh Content and Revolutionizing
Content Distribution
Much of today’s broadband
content is replicated. Essentially, it’s the same movies playing over and over again.
Very few cable channels actually maintain “fresh” (continually changing) content
– some examples of these include 24 hour news channels, sports channels, etc. Oddly
enough, most all public broadcasting stations maintain “relatively fresh”
content – as it is unlikely to see the same program twice in one day or during the
same week. Service providers that just repeat the same content over and over will face
stiff challenges from more diverse service providers that offer fresh or personalized
content on demand. The advent and perfection of VOD along with assembling extensive
libraries of popular movies should decrease demand for long standing movie channel
providers. Customers want to watch what they want when they want rather than what is
playing at specific times that may or may not be convenient – that is the beauty of
VOD. Although some move channel providers produce some original content, it will be
difficult for them to spin off as a separate service provider organization or sell their
services directly to broadband customers, as they do not officially own a majority of
their content. It is the movie-making companies who are in the driver’s seat to make
their extensive archive of movies available for VOD viewing. Such a service provider would
be attractive to broadband operators and would permit movie-making companies to directly
sell their movies to broadband customers. In the end, the number of service providers that
offer movies would decrease or perhaps specialize into genre specific focuses (sci-fi,
action/adventure, humor, etc.). Regardless, the problem of revolutionizing content
distribution is needed.
Maximizing Return on Capital
Investments
Open access will challenge
traditional broadband operators ability to compete with businesses who specialized in
providing information and/or entertainment. Some new broadband operators have already
taken a more toll-road type of common carrier approach as the time required to turn profit
on capital investments to launch new content services is growing out of control. To
address this, broadband operators may need to split off a separate operating group to form
a service provider that can sell its information and/or entertainment services to several
broadband operators. These service providers would compete with other service providers to
ensure broadband customers receive increasingly better services and quality content. By
doing this, smaller broadband operators could offer nearly the same content as larger
broadband operators (depending on their available bandwidth) without investing in costly
capital equipment. In this case, becoming a service provider is also more attractive as a
single capital investment can claim several income streams. However, traditional broadband
operators have only considered relinquishing the service of providing Internet to open
access. In the grand scheme of things, open access is not defined and not synonymous with
only Internet access. Rather, open access means freedom of choice for broadband customers
to choose from a much broader array information and/or entertainment services provided by
a multitude of different entities. Open access in terms of providing an Internet service
is but a small step in this direction and more major steps are needed to realize the full
potential of open access.
Achieving 5 Nines
>Before service providers can be
successful using broadband, the HFC must be tight and ultra reliable. By not having to
upgrade, maintain, and seek new content services broadband operators could invest more
time and energy to tighten and more closely scrutinize minute changes in the HFC in an
effort to make broadband a very reliable transmission media. However, today’s
broadband operators are spread thin attempting to move new services onto broadband while
building up completely new HFC maintenance and network operations organizations. As a
result, HFC maintenance, automation, and staffing takes a back seat to launching new
services which are increasingly dependent on a rock solid broadband transmission media.
While the broadband industry claims good network reliability numbers they are not 5 nines
or 99.999%. There is also some doubt about the accuracy of these numbers as explained in a
previous CT article about customer premise vs. end of line monitoring. Essentially, this
article explains that a large portion of HFC network is invisible to broadband operators.
If it is invisible, the reliability numbers do not reflect the health of the whole
broadband network but rather only a portion of it. Products are needed that permit
operators to delve further into the inter workings of their HFC networks and help them
detect, diagnose, troubleshoot, and correct problems before they become service impacting.
Pushing Content to the Networks’
Edge
Another challenge with moving to open
access is the problem of providing readily available content. As the network pipe that
connects individual users to broadband increases, the availability of content at the
networks’ edge becomes paramount. This problem has plagued many popular Internet
sites as they quickly discovered that providing a single web site for the world to access
is unachievable. Instead, the best method of providing content is to push it down to the
far reaches (or edges) of the network so it can be placed (and/or cached) as close the
customer as possible. For broadband providers, this means placing content in the headends
and distribution hubs. Traditional broadband HSD was actually designed with this in mind,
placing numerous Internet services extremely close to customers. However, open access may
pull this content back away from customers and place it at more distant service provider
facilities. For example, in order for multiple service providers to offer email to
customers each would need to place an email server in every broadband operators’
headend – an unlikely solution since broadband providers would not be willing to give
up the floor or rack space to facilitate this (some don’t even have the available
space). Pushing content further up from the networks’ edge forces the rest of the
network to handle more capacity while juggling critical service quality, scalability, and
redundancy issues. As a result, solutions are needed to enable completely open access to
different service providers without extending the content beyond its optimal reach.
Summary
All
broadband providers can benefit from open access as it allows them to specialized in
taking care of their customers while managing their service providers, bandwidth, and
network reliability. Best of all, open access completes the vision of broadband by placing
new service activation on the open market and making bandwidth available for any new
startup that wants to become part of broadband.
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