CED articles from February 2003

CED archives from February 2003

Honeymoon in Vegas. (in perspective).
February 1, 2003... The cable TV industry's power elite returned to Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show last month and had a decidedly larger impact than a year ago, when key leaders also made a pilgrimage to Sin City, but toured the show floor as mere...

Cable, CE industry find common ground on `plug-and-play' DTV. (Upfront: latest news and insight).
February 1, 2003... Following months of negotiations and weeks of rumors that the sides were closing in on finding common ground, several top U.S. cable MSOs and more than a dozen consumer electronics companies finally agreed on how to offer digital programming...

Cable gear breaks advanced specs barrier. (Upfront: latest news and insight).
February 1, 2003... The cable industry reached a significant milestone following the completion of certification wave 24, as CableLabs handed out its first passing grades for DOCSIS 2.0, PacketCable 1.0 and CableHome 1.0. On the DOCSIS 2.0 front, CableLabs...

Big bucks put WildBlue back on the launch pad. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... WildBlue Communications, whose dreams of building a residential broad-band satellite service were on the verge of being flushed down the proverbial toilet, might soon find itself flush with cash thanks to a new round of funding. The...

A Novo Broadband in need of a financial fix. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... A Novo Broadband Inc., a New Castle, Del.-based outfit that fixes cable modems and set-tops, has filed for protection under Chapter 11, despite the fact that revenue at its repair division has more than doubted in the past 12 months. The...

Full RPR draft released for working group ballot. (Upfront: latest news and insight).
February 1, 2003... The efforts behind Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) technology reached another milestone after a draft version 2.0 of the standard--the first to include a "complete" version of the draft--was released for working group ballot. From there, the...

Cable, DSL show similar gains. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... Thanks to advances by cable modem and DSL technology, high-speed connections to the Internet jumped 27 percent during the first half of 2002, for a total of 16.2 million lines in service, the Federal Communications Commission reported recently...

CommScope re-ups with Bechtel. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... CommScope Inc. said it has extended its supply agreement with Bechtel Corp. through 2003 for undisclosed financial terms. Under the new deal. CommScope will supply Bechtel's telecom unit with "Cell Reach" wireless products and other...

Wavexpress taps AP for broadband news. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... Wavexpress said it will bolster its Library of broadband content via a new deal with AP Digital, a division of The Associated Press that distributes news and information to Internet and wireless customers. The agreement will allow...

Gotuit banks on `slice and dice' DVR software. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Gotuit Media Corp.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... Gotuit Media Corp., an Andover, Mass.-based company that makes software for digital video recorders and video-on-demand applications, said it raised $6 million, led by Highland Capital Partners. The cash infusion marked the first...

Microtune tunes into DOCSIS 2.0. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... Microtune Inc. has become the latest component maker to jump on the DOCSIS 2.0 bandwagon with the introduction of the MicroStreamer MT1560. The 3.3-volt MT1560 is designed to support the more symmetrical bandwidth capacity fostered by...

Correction.
February 1, 2003... On page 8 of the January CED/InDepth supplement, we inadvertently listed John Chang's company as Allied Business Information. The correct name of the company is Allied Business Intelligence.

Motive, BroadJump reach broadband milestone. (Upfront: latest news and insight).(Motive Communications Inc.)(BroadJump Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... On the heels of a merger inked fast November, Motive Communications Inc. and BroadJump Inc. said their combined products are being used to support more than 10 million subscriber deployments of residential broadband service and "e-support." ...

Fiber-to-the-home blazes an evolutionary path: the sector is still dominated by small and spotty deployments by the usual suspects, but larger-scale FTTH rollouts are inching closer.
February 1, 2003... When it comes to fiber-to-the-home, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. For starters, the same segments are deploying the technology on the same slow-but-sure path they were about 12 months ago. Most cable...

Cable makes the hard sell. (ET Wrap-up).
February 1, 2003... Following a new digital "plug-and-play" agreement, the cable and consumer electronics (CE) industries are no longer at each other's throats, but are embracing each other and discovering ways to make beautiful music (and money) together. ...

Implementing conditional access: design considerations for cost, flexibility and security. (Networking: advanced networking technology).
February 1, 2003... The popularity and revenue-generating potential of pay-per-view television and digital programming has created a need for flexible and secure solutions to content distribution. New conditional access (CA) architectures that separate the...

Controlling the cost of fiber-to-the-X: how to balance reliability, scalability and profitability. (Broadband: business and news perspective).
February 1, 2003... With every emerging technology, early adopters pay the price of development. When BellSouth attempted the first major fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) development in the early 1980s, the costs seemed unbearable and the FTTH concept stalled. Years...

James Madison would be disappointed. (Ciciora's corner).(Editorial)
February 1, 2003... James Madison wrote in "The Federalist Papers": "It will be of little avail to the people that laws are made by men of their choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood... that...

The status of FTTH: a recent report forecasts a bright future for fiber-to-the-home. (Analyst's corner: industry research).
February 1, 2003... Most new technology and architectures begin on the humble side. Before something gets rolled out in the mainstream, it usually suffers through its requisite growing pains. Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology is apparently no exception to that...

Network monitoring.(AM Communications Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... QUAKERTOWN, Pa. -- AM Communications Inc. has developed two DOCSIS-based status monitoring transponders for cable TV UPS power supplies. The Model 9360 is an external transponder that employs DOCSIS signaling for communications over the RF...

Battery backup unit.(from American Power Conversion Corp.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... WEST KINGSTON, R.I. -- American Power Conversion (APC) has expanded its DC power protection offering with the new Desktop PowerShield, a 12 VDC output/24-watt battery backup unit intended for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), fiber-to-the-subscriber...

Test platform.(from Sunrise Telecom Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Sunrise Telecom has introduced the Scalable Test Toolkit (STT), a next-generation testing platform designed to meet the challenges associated with the design, installation, and maintenance of core, metro and access networks....

Compressed domain editing software.(from VitisTech Technologies)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... ISRAEL -- VitisTech Technologies has announced its new software-based, MPEG-2 compressed domain logo inserter/overlaid animated ad insertion module. The new software enables the implementation of complex editing operations, tike ad and animated...

Encryptor/modulator technology.(Motorola Inc. Broadband Communications Sector)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Motorola Inc. Broadband Communications Sector has introduced its SmartStream Encryptor/ Modulator (SEM) technology. The Motorola SEM works with operators' existing digital networks to quickly and efficiently multiplex,...

Headend system.(from Minerva Networks)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Minerva Networks has announced the addition of video pre-processing capabilities to its VC8000 headend system. The carrier-class platform now offers telecommunications service providers a more powerful means of delivering...

Customer care.(Convergys Corp.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... CINCINNATI -- With the pressure on to squeeze more and more operational efficiencies out of current networks, the latest release of the Convergys ICOMS billing and customer care system adds extra layers of integration and new support for the...

Attacking the crown jewels. (capital currents).(Sony aims to compete with Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta)
February 1, 2003... The one hot new idea at the 2002 Western Cable Show came from Sony: "Let's go after the crown jewels!" The crown jewels of a cable system are the conditional access (CA) system and the out-of-band (0OB) channel. And the crown jewelers are...

Starlight-starbright? iTV's `Big Bang' revenue theory has yet to translate into boom times for broadband.
February 1, 2003... The Big Bang revenue theory once promised by interactive TV (iTV) has burst into a duster of smaller stars and is being reduced to a bundle of little revenue pops, at best, as MSOs and the iTV vendor community re-think and reengineer their...

Game on. (iTV Gaming).(cable providers look to interactive services)
February 1, 2003... Interactive and online gaming is poised to become a bigger piece of the package that cable operators offer their subscribers in the coming year. Some of the growth will be fueled by new online platforms, and still more through operator programs...

PacketCable[TM] voice-over-IP system architecture.
February 1, 2003... PacketCable is a set of protocols developed to deliver enhanced communications services using packetized data transmission technology. The PacketCable architecture leverages DOCSIS 1.1 to integrate three separate networks: the hybrid...