NEW ORLEANS – With the SCTE Cable-Tec still going strong here in ‘the Big Easy’, Cartt.ca took a stroll around the Exhibit Hall on Thursday to see what’s new.
The short answer? A lot, though we noticed a distinct trend towards products and services that MSOs could use as enhancements to their existing services in the cable-enabled ‘networked home’. A second dominant theme was energy-efficient technologies and solutions.
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Our first stop was at the booth of Waterloo, ON-based network management solutions provider Sandvine. The company released its annual global Internet traffic report at the show, which analyzes subscriber behaviour based on data from cable, DSL and mobile service provider networks in 80 countries.
This report marked the first time where the behaviors of fixed and mobile users were compared. And what did they find?
“That the Internet is the Internet”, said John Astorino, AVP of product management, in a discussion with Cartt.ca. “What that means is that people are looking to consume data on the Internet in the same way across either their home PC, their mobile, their smart phone or whatever they have.”
Astorino also described usage as “regionalized and personalized”, noting the preponderance of plans and personalized services appealing to the broadband-individual, rather than the broadband-household.
Within North America, the report found that real-time entertainment (think Netflix) is the largest contributor to data consumption on both fixed (43% of peak period traffic) and mobile access (41%) networks. And speaking of Netflix, the report found that the Internet movie subscription service represented more than 2% of downstream traffic during peak hours on fixed access networks in the US.
“For a mature market like North America, that’s a real shift in subscriber trends”, remarked product marketing manager, Lee Brooks, to Cartt.ca.
Other international findings in the report include:
– Overall, there is a wide variation in the amount of time Internet connections are active. In North America, the average time a fixed connection is active is three hours, whereas in Asia-Pacific, it’s closer to 5.5 hours;
– Social networking services like Facebook continue to be a significant and growing proportion of mobile Internet traffic. Over the last eight months, the percentage of mobile traffic in Latin America attributable to social networking almost doubled, while in North America, it increased by 33%;
– Median fixed access data consumption ranged from 4 gigabytes per month in North America to almost 12 gigabytes in Asia-Pacific; and
– In Europe, zSHARE has become the dominant leader for storage and back-up services. It accounts for 3% of downstream traffic during peak periods.
‘Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena’, is the eighth report in an on-going series of Internet phenomena and traffic analysis that Sandvine has published since 2002. Click here for more on the report.
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Next, it was over to another Canadian vendor’s booth. Victoria-based Vecima Networks was promoting its newly launched Concierge IP to QAM converter.
Compatible with satellite, cable and IPTV operators, the device is geared towards MDUs or hospitality locations looking to provide HD channel lineups over RF.
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The busy CableLabs booth featured a number of technology demonstrations including:
– The EBIF (enhanced binary interchange format) platform, an interactive television standard targeted to reach 25 million US households by year-end;
– Wi-Fi gateway management, which includes configuration and performance reports for efficient cable operator Wi-Fi deployments plus support for customer care services;
– Proactive network maintenance, which focuses on the use of pre-equalization data and network topology information for proactive fault localization and troubleshooting of cable plant problems; and
– The CableLabs AdLab and Canoe Innovation Lab, which was created to help advance dynamic ad insertion using SCTE 130 standards.
Founded in 1988 by the cable television industry, CableLabs is a non-profit research and development consortium dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those advancements in to their business objectives.
