Never Play Poker with Tarot Cards
By Jeff Finkelstein
For those that attended this year’s SCTE TechExpo, you likely witnessed some exciting things. Vendors have made progress on developing DOCSIS 4.0 passives, actives, vCMTS, and tools. Broadcom announced that the D4.0 unified silicon would be available to everyone without requiring a joint development agreement supporting both FDX and ESD (aka DOCSIS 4.0 FDD), and they also announced an early prototype for what could become next-gen DOCSIS. Comcast showed improvements in overall performance of FDX and how AI/ML integration in the unified silicon may be used to improve overall plant performance using the unified amplifier technology to digitally remove problematic devices from the network. In general, technologies were shown that could potentially make a significant difference in how the future state of the cable network will transform into a self-healing network. I realize this paragraph is full of hyperbolic examples, but in today’s cable world the coolest innovations are not just at the physical layer, they are at the software/AI layer.
As a now retired observer I am quite pleased with the progress made in the past year. There is still much work to be done, but the efforts of many involved need to be recognized and applauded. Creating new technologies is never easy, cheap, nor simple. As has been true for many years, there are those happy to sit on the sidelines and toss out reasons why it will never work onto the playing field.
As Jeff’s Rule #5 states:
Do not look at future technologies wearing glasses from the past.
We have all been guilty of looking at something new and thinking it will never work based on past experiences. Thankfully, the innovators push things forward regardless of the naysayers. I learned this the hard way with first visualizing DOCSIS 3.1 and DOCSIS 4.0. It takes around 10 years from the initial spark of an idea to the realization of products. The biggest challenge is not coming up with the technological solution, it is understanding the problem and getting others to see it as well.
To me, there remains one question that still needs to be answered. By way of explanation I’ll use one of the great lines from the movie “Field of Dreams” with a slight twist, “If you build it, will they come?”. In today’s environment with loss of subscribers, reduction in OpEx and CapEx, headcount reductions with loss of experienced engineers, and increased overall costs, how will things continue move into a future state that will allow operators and vendors to remain financially sound?
I have no answers at the moment, but it is an important topic that needs to be discussed, not ignored. If we meet our numbers at the expense of the future, what have we actually won other than a nicer bonus this year?
Transformation is never easy
As with every prior version of DOCSIS, there have been and will always be challenges to deploying and managing future technologies. The ecosystem that supports the cable network not only in the outside and inside plant, but also with OSS, BSS, EMS, and NMS, are complex beasties. It takes a village not only to raise a child, but to install and manage a cable network. Involving the entire organization as soon as is possible only makes things less problematic as those new technologies are deployed. You can only kick the can so far down the road before you run out of road.
As my bubbie frequently said, “Mann tracht und Gott lacht.” Which translates to “Men plan and God laughs.” No amount of planning and hope will catch all the things that can and will go wrong. It is how we respond to the unforeseen that determines whether new technologies will survive. Naysayers are quick to jump on the failures, but slow to acknowledge the successes.
Developing new technologies is hard. But for the most part, customers do not care about the technology used as long as it is there when they need it.
As Jeff’s Rule #49 states:
Customers don’t care about refrigeration, they just want ice cubes.
So what do customers really want?
The importance of meeting and surpassing expectations is required for success in maintaining the customer base and giving them reasons not to move to newer technologies. During the pandemic the building blocks put in place with DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 provided what was needed with enough bandwidth to meet the demand. During the rollouts financial folks questioned why we needed to spend the money and have so much excess capacity. Financials are critical to success, but if it decides technologies, the tail can only wag the dog for so long.
Looking back I realize that while bandwidth is important, customers have come to expect more. As a consumer myself, there are five technologies I expect to always work:
- Electricity
- Water
- Sewage
- Internet
- Coffee
In today’s world, all five are essentials I need in my daily life. If any are missing it is going to be a rough day. Note that speed is not mentioned. As an industry we were quick to jump on the speed wars when we held a winning hand, but now that fiber is rapidly being deployed everywhere we need to change the messaging.
Many years ago I made the controversial statement that become
Jeff’s Rule #61:
The only way to compete with fiber is with fiber.
I know that is a scary statement, but in reality don’t get into a losing fight over technology.
Cable is an incredibly resilient technology that has worked well for 70+ years and will last a long time. However, it is undeniable that fiber is a better technology. Not so much better that we should throw up our hands and weep, but there are things it is just better at doing. Accepting that and moving forward is critical to long-term success.
We now have intelligent water and electric meters that not only are highly accurate, but also allow remote monitoring. Companies have been created around these intelligent devices to monitor usage and availability, but also allow for managing delivery of those services to work around issues.
Reliability and resiliency are critical to meet customer expectations.
Internet availability falls into the same category. Every new technology deployed must have sufficient hooks to not only allow constant monitoring, but also provide mechanisms for self-healing networks. The intelligence being built into new amplifiers are an excellent step towards this goal.
Bandwidth may be king, but reliability is queen. All hail the queen!
But at what cost?
In the effort to reduce costs it often makes improving availability difficult. We spend much time trying to figure out how to do more for less, but when it comes to new technologies there are inevitable discussions about the time value of money. Don’t spend the money until you must. We never hear people talk about the money value of time.
Deploying these new technologies takes years. Plant upgrades, software integration of new backend support technologies, getting new active and passive technologies deployed in preparation for new services, and much more. The longer we are stuck in analysis paralysis, the later we will be in responding to competitive threats. And quite possibly it will be too late when we finally decide we need to do something.
I remember well a teaching from the Dartmouth experience SCTE put together years ago. I was fortunate to be chosen to attend the first class and still can hear one of the professors asking “What is an executive?”. The answer was “An executive is someone who when presented with all available information that does not lead to a single solution, makes a decision regardless with the information at hand.”
Now is the time. Act now, be bold, and stay true to your company’s philosophies.
And now for something completely different
I will write about this further at a later time, but I want to briefly touch on it here. Speaking as the one who created and pushed DOCSIS 4.0 ESD into the spec, I have been a bit of a zealot when it comes to the technology. What I learned from the current state of things is that the unified silicon allows for an ESD-like experience. It is FDX under-the-hood, but using the static FDX spec (another idea I pushed into the spec) you get the best of both worlds. Whether you choose to use unified FDX amps or not is a choice that has to be made, but even if using fixed diplexers you still get to take some advantage of the unified silicon. With 1.8 GHz FDX used in dynamic or static mode, you have a very powerful and feature-rich technology that needs to be strongly considered. Especially with the integrated AI/ML engine.
More on this in my next article, but it was a revelation to me.
Jeff Finkelstein,
Prior to retirement, Jeff Finkelstein was the Chief Access Scientist for Cox Communications in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been a key contributor to engineering at Cox since 2002 and is an innovator of advanced technologies including proactive network maintenance, active queue management, flexible MAC architecture, DOCSIS 3.1, and DOCSIS 4.0. His responsibilities included defining the future cable network vision and teaching innovation at Cox. Jeff has over 50 patents issued or pending. He is also a long-time member of the SCTE Chattahoochee Chapter and member of the Cable TV Pioneers class of 2022.
Images provided by author, Shutterstock
