TORONTO – Despite attempts to smooth over their differences, Comcast and Time Warner Cable appear at least somewhat at odds over a proposed next-generation architecture for the cable industry.
Hints about potentially key technical differences between Time Warner’s new convergence edge project and a similar project pioneered by Comcast kept cropping up at the SCTE Canadian Summit here the past two days. Although cable executives tried to downplay any differences between the two initiatives, it appears the two biggest U.S. MSOs may be charting somewhat divergent paths on the new architecture, frustrating the original goals of cable technologists, aggravating equipment vendors, and potentially driving up production costs.
Questioned about the reported differences between the two major next-gen projects on a panel Wednesday, Comcast CTO and executive vice-president Tony Werner acknowledged reports that Time Warner is seeking new edge devices that are smaller and less dense than Comcast prefers. But he declined to go beyond that.
"We prefer to see things of this nature be industry-wide," he said during the panel. “Otherwise, it doesn’t do the cable industry any good.”
For more than a year, Comcast has been heavily promoting its project, known as Converged Multiservice Access Platform (CMAP). The CMAP initiative promises to cut power and cooling costs, save required headend space, improve port densities, and achieve other significant efficiencies by merging the traditional functions of the cable modem termination system (CMTS) and the edge QAM, which are now housed in separate devices.
Since launching the project, Comcast has signed up a number of other major MSOs and cable organizations as partners, including Canadian MSO Rogers Communications, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications, Liberty Global, Cable Europe Labs, and National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), a consortium of smaller U.S. cable operators. Comcast has also signed up virtually all of the industry’s CMTS and edge QAM vendors, as well as such major router suppliers as Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks. “We have had pretty good buy-in,” Werner said.
But Time Warner has been conspicuously missing from that list. Light Reading Cable revealed why earlier this week, reporting that Time Warner is separately pursuing its own next-gen edge device, known as Converged Edge Services Router (CESAR). Time Warner confirmed the report.
As reported, both initiatives share many of the same goals. For example, both CMAP and CESAR seek to produce super-dense headend devices that will save headend space, reduce power, manage all cable services, and help cable operators carry out the tricky migration to full IP video delivery.
But the two MSOs reportedly differ over key elements of those devices as well. For example, as Werner admitted, Time Warner is looking to deploy smaller, less dense chassis than the ones that Comcast has in mind for cable systems with large headends and hubs.
Playing the diplomat publicly, Werner said he’s hopeful that Time Warner’s CESAR work will lead to "another profile of CMAP" for vendors to assemble. “As long as we can get pretty common on the strategy,” he said, CMAP and CESAR can work together well.
Other MSO executives still have their concerns about the potential CMAP-CESAR divide, though. Speaking on the same panel as Werner Wednesday, Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice president of access networks at Rogers, said he hopes that the two projects end up following the same technical vein so that economic scale can be achieved. “It’s always better to have scale,” he noted.
Equipment vendors hope that they won’t have to make two totally different products for the two huge MSOs. "Our goal is to come up with a single architecture that works for both," said John Ulm, fellow of the technical staff for the CTO office at Motorola Mobility, speaking on a separate panel. "We are looking at the different features and hope it will be limited to software differences."
Meanwhile, such MSOs as Cox are already developing strategies for upgrading to CMAP without switching out the CMTSs and edge QAM devices they’ve already deployed. Speaking on the same panel as Ulm, Jeff Finkelstein, senior director of network architecture for Cox, said his company is weighing a “CMAP lite" approach that would start by replacing the edge QAM functions with an initial, downstream-only implementation of CMAP.
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network.
