The SCTE Autumn Lecture Meeting & AGM, 2004.

SCTE Autumn Lecture Meeting & AGM, 2004 The Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers held its AUTUMN LECTURE MEETING entitled "Delivering Quality" on WEDNESDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 2004 at; Graeme Young, Deputy Editor of 'Broadband', reports on the days proceeedings. The presentation slides will be available here, soon. You can right click on the presenters' names to download the presentations slides.		SCTE Papers Committee chairman, Mark Burns presides over the day.

SCTE President, Roger Blakeway provides a standards update.	"Standards Update" The first presentation was from the Society President, Roger Blakeway who made the ostensibly dull subject of Standards much more appealing. After revealing the chronology of telecommunication standards, he detailed the Society's close involvement in the setting of many of those standards. The Society has representatives sitting on CENELEC and IEC committees, currently the TA5 working group is engaged in the revision of current standards to bring them up to date, increasing the scope of 60728, and the development of new standards.

"Migration from HFC to FTTX" presented by Jim Farmer, Chief Technical Officer, Wave 7 Optics Jim Farmer, CTO of Wave7 Optics spoke about the desirability of fibre to the home (FTTH). In comparison, HFC networking requires constant vigilance with the attendant high costs of maintenance. Optical networks also provide a low-cost return path with very wide bandwidth, and will allow a speed of 31MB/S per subscriber with symmetrical channels. Telephony is better quality and highly reliable, the network itself has a long life. Typically a network will have a downstream wavelength of 1550nm and upstream data is carried on 1310nm. The use of 1310nm bi-directional transmission permits data flow of 500MB/S between 16 subscribers. The use of FTTH is justifiable economically on the grounds of its low maintenance costs and the high degree of future-proofing. The presence of fibre optic cable in the home is not considered to constitute a problem, the drop fibre is contained in an armoured sheath. Fabry-Perot lasers are used and a 12dB link loss budget is assumed, each subscriber receives a minimum of -2dBm signal.		Jim Farmer, Chief Technical Officer, Wave 7 Optics

Paul Broadhurst, Chief Executive Officer, Technetix plc	"Migration of Installation of TV, Broadband and Voice Services to a Self Install Environment" presented by Paul Broadhurst, Chief Executive Officer, Technetix Ltd Paul Broadhurst, CEP of Technetix plc introduced the concept of 'Self-Install' for cable subscribers. The adoption of this concept in the USA has resulted in a rapid increase in Broadband connections. Self-Install presents a massive marketing opportunity The introduction of the scheme would enhance cable's share of the broadband market, and allow system operators more time and effort to move to symmetrical data networks. It would also allow the operator to reduce staffing of the installation teams and, in so doing, vehicle count. The establishment of an acceptable standard for In-Home Architectures would be advisable There are distinct opportunities in home networking as a development of the Self-Install concept. However, CENELEC must impose mandatory standards on the equipment if supplied in retail packs.

"Video over IP Quality of Service" presented by Stephane Oillic, European Technical Director of Ineoquest Stephane gave a very detailed account of providing Video over IP Quality of Service. The VoIP market is huge with the development of the Home Network, Telephony, and Governmental applications. MPEG over IP solves the IP packet jitter, data rate over-runs and under-runs and dropped IP packets. The MPEG buffer removes the Ethernet frame. Currently Ineoquest is working with Cisco to define measurement methods. The proposed measurement is on Media Delivery Index (MDI) which is defined as Delay Factor / Media Loss %. The Delay factor is the inter-packet delay in mS.		Stephane Oillic, European Technical Director of Ineoquest

Danny Wilson of Pixelmetrix Corporation	"DVB-C Quality Assurance in Heterogeneous Network Environment" presented by Danny Wilson of Pixelmetrix Corporation Danny spoke of DVB-C Quality Assurance in Heterogeneous Network Development. There are challenges in bringing new services to the market. IP would allow 'Centralcasting' with remote control of equipment across the globe. the steady migration towards IT infrastructures is inevitable. New technology can perform supervision more effectively once one knows what intelligence is built into the box being monitored, and perhaps the scope and accuracy of such intelligence san also be standardised. There is also a threat to security, there were 60,000 hack attacks already this year and there have been some notable intrusions into some playout channels. A monitoring system needs good alarm management and trouble-free integration into the network, it must manage time, content and location, in other words, if something stops you want to know when, on what channel and where!

"Practical Effects of Ferrite Saturation" presented by Byron Buie, VP of Engineering, RMS Communications Inc This last presentation of the day from Byron Buie was a very practical demonstration of the intermodulation effects of ferrite saturation. The problem arises where a cable modem is passing a large RF signal via a splitter carrying other signals, possibly TV channels. If the ferrite core of the transformer is saturated it becomes extremely non-linear and causes intermodulation on lower video channels.The demonstration clearly identified the nature of the problem by showing how de-saturating the ferrite using a proprietary tape-head degaussing tool improved the intermodulation performance. An easy and obvious solution, especially for all new build, is to use passives that have ferrites that are not easily magnetized. These are now available from several manufacturers and, in addition, offer improved performance for return loss, isolation and insertion loss as well as improved 'f' connectors to reduce the 'diode' effect and common path distortion.		Byron Buie, VP of Engineering, RMS Communications Inc

Alan Whitlock and Chris Swires on the TS Queen Mary	AGM and Time to Relax The Society's A.G.M. was held immediately after the last lecture, and this was followed by the customary chance to relax and talk with colleagues, fellow members and the speakers aboard the TS Queen Mary moored on the Thames opposite the IEE. The status of the Society has, once again, brought a high quality Lecture Programme to its Members which would cost well in excess of £250 if it was presented commercially. The Lecture Meetings are just a part of the services we provide to all SCTE Members free of charge. Non-Members are also welcome to attend for a nominal charge. So, to all those Non-Members out there, why not become a Member and make a considerable saving on the two full-day Lecture Meetings each year? Please note that for any Non-Members attending this Lecture Meeting, we are pleased to announce that £20 of your attendance fee is redeemable against your first full year's membership subscription provided that you apply by the end of October 2004.


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