IP Democracy: Narad Aims for Cable to Deliver 100 Mbps to Consumers

As consumer bandwidth demands escalate, broadband providers keep upping the ante with faster and faster services — Verizon’s FiOS 15 Mbps/2 Mbps service and Comcast’s equally blazing FiOS-killer are just the latest examples. Now, along comes Westford, MA-based cable TV tech company Narad Networks with a plan to help cable operators deliver 100 Mbps/100 Mbps service, the first time I’ve seen a tech vendor pitch this level of speed to the U.S. industry (Arris is testing 100 Mbps service with NTL in the U.K.)

And Narad isn’t blowing smoke — the company has been testing its residential bandwidth-expanding technology with Cablevision Systems on Long Island. (I would expect Cablevision to be among the first operators to deploy’s Narad’s full-blown turbo-charged solution, maybe even next year.)

Here’s how it works: Narad’s technology basically consists of a new Ethernet switch that works in a lot of configurations, but for the residential 100 Mbps/100 Mbps idea it sits at various coax tap locations in the operator’s hybrid-fiber network. All traffic — Ethernet from fiber and video and voice services from coax — is then fed through the switch and shipped to the customer’s home.

In the home, a Narad modem filters the different types of content so that video goes to the set and symmetrical Ethernet content goes to the PC (or ultimately wherever it’s needed).

One big problem: most cable systems are built according to fiber-to-the-node blueprints and in order to get the maximum speeds that Narad is promising, operators are going to have to push fiber closer to the consumer, or push fiber to the “curb.” However, in most situations this isn’t an costly prospect. Narad thinks operators can get the fiber extension done for $50/home. The product also works with fiber-to-the-node, fiber-to-the-curb and fiber-to-the-premises.

I talked to Narad CEO Michael Collette this afternoon about this news — I don’t often ask to be briefed by vendors, but this time my curiousity was peaked.

He said that most cable operators won’t jump to the extreme of 100 Mbps/100 Mbps but will take it in increments to pump up capacity. “Most will start with smaller bites but it will depend on whether they are under competitive pressure,” Collette said, referring to locations where Verizon is rolling its fiber-to-the-premises services.

Some operators are eyeing the idea of moving to an all-IP platform for all services, and 100 Mbps is enough for everything — voice, video and data. “There are certain MSOs that are looking at next generation architecture and they might be phasing in plans next year,” he said. “The 100 Mbps, which is up above existing video, data and voice, it’s enough for all voice, data and services into the home.”

Collette’s reference to the “up above existing video, data and voice service” relates to Narad’s use of spectrum outside the normal operating frequencies used by cable systems. The company initially invented the technology so that cable companies could roll out commercial high-speed services by squeezing T1-like capacity out of their networks.

But…cable companies are moving as quickly on commercial services as some in the industry anticipated a few years back. For one thing, it’s expensive to serve businesses and for another, it’s not cable’s expertise.

Narad decided to leverage its technology for the booming residential marketplace. “The stuff we did for commercial was cool but it was sort of productized in a way that the costs to deploy it were a bit high,” Collette said.

Cable operators may not be quite ready to deploy 100 Mbps/100 Mbps service — some execs wonder exactly what consumers would do with that much capacity. “I find that kind of a hard thing to understand. The number of things we don’t do today in the economy because there is not enough pipe out there” are too numerous to count, Collette says, such as remote data storage (e.g. backing up a PC online), two-way video conferencing and streaming video security services.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on June 19, 2006 2:47 PM to IP Democracy