What’s Cooking at CableLabs

The hits just keep coming out of CableLabs, the joint research and development outfit of the major domestic cable companies.

Among the big impact items CableLabs is working on now are DOCSIS 3.0 and the OpenCable Applications Platform (OCAP), says Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst with In-Stat. “DOCSIS 3.0 … supports channel bonding for cable modems, and presents opportunities for a cable modem service to provide up to 160mbps of downstream peak bandwidth, along with the ability to provide up to 120mbps of peak upstream bandwidth,” says Kaufhold. “OCAP includes an Enhanced TV, or ETV, specification that will eventually be used to make it possible for digital cable TV systems to offer truly interactive ads, similar to what is happening today on the broadband Internet.”

CableLabs’ Ralph Brown

The CableLabs Certified Cable Modem project, also known as DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), defines interface requirements for cable modems involved in high-speed data distribution over cable television system networks.

The project also provides cable modem equipment suppliers with a fast, market-oriented method for attaining cable industry acknowledgment of DOCSIS compliance and has resulted in high-speed modems being certified for retail sale.

“DOCSIS 3.0 is the hot item for this year,” says CableLabs CTO Ralph Brown. “We’ve been conducting interoperability tests and are very pleased with the results.” CableLabs will do qualification and certification testing later this year with anticipated product availability following shortly thereafter, he says.

DOCSIS 3.0 is crucial to the present and future of cableco networks seeking more speed as broadband bundles proliferate and to support the addition of bandwidth-intensive video services. It specifies downstream channel bonding to create bigger “pipes” akin to how DSL uses copper bonding to achieve the same goal. The latest DOCSIS version also supports IPv6 and IP multicasting improvements for services such as IPTV.

“Cable operators are so anxious about 3.0 that many have begun pre-3.0 [approval] field trials in order to get early experience with its capabilities before the rollout of certified products,” says Brown.

Soaring demand for really high-speed Internet service to the home is driving 3.0 quickly, according to John Holobinko, vice president and general manager of the cable IP business group at BigBand Networks Inc., which provides an array of infrastructure for cable operators. The company introduced a pre-3.0 product in late March that uses the 3.0 downstream with an upstream capability based on 2.0 to help cablecos while they await the completion of the new spec process.

The OpenCable effort began in 1997 with the goal of helping the cable industry deploy interactive services over cable. OCAP provides a set of industry specs that define next-generation digital consumer devices, encourage supplier competition, and create a retail hardware and software platform.

CableLabs says the OpenCable project has two key components: a hardware specification and a software specification.

The hardware specification describes both one-way and two-way digital cable-ready “host” devices that are interoperable with cable systems throughout the United States, thus creating a retail solution for consumer electronics products for cable.

The software specification solves the problem of proprietary operating system software, thereby creating a common platform for interactive television applications and services. CableLabs says interactive (bi-directional) OpenCable products require an OCAP middleware stack.

While he doesn’t see subscribers and potential cable customers rushing to retail outlets to buy set-top boxes instead of getting them through their service providers, Brown says OCAP is useful in that it’s a Java-based environment that separates applications from set-top hardware, graphics cards and processors for application development purposes.

Perhaps realizing that a lack of open applications based on a common framework is being blamed by domestic service providers for the long wait for even basic interactive TV service (see this month’s story on interactive TV for more on this discussion), CableLabs has defined a limited set of what it calls “program enhancements.”

“This constrained set of applications includes polling, advertising and ordering products through the TV,” says Brown. “We want to enable a set of apps to run across all STBs, but there are tens of millions that don’t run OCAP now.”

The key to solving that problem is for OpenCable set-top boxes to use a common format in supporting interactive TV, or what CableLabs refers to as “enhanced television.”

“Enhanced TV is a big activity and we’ve held a number of trials to determine ways to exploit its enabling technology for capabilities such as ‘telescoping,’ whereby a viewer can click on an ad and be taken off the linear broadcast to a VoD session to get more information, and then be returned to the TV broadcast,” explains Brown.