The SCTE Spring Lecture Meeting, 2005.

The Battle for Broadband Britain The SCTE Spring Lecture Meeting, 2005, was held on Tuesday, 26th April, 2005. The theme of the meeting was the competing technologies being made available to subscribers. It's no longer a question of if it is worth going broadband but one of when and using which technology. Our programme featured papers on various broadband technologies and how they will impact broadband deployment in the UK. 64 attendees heard five interesting presentations and the comments of one of them are typical of the audience's reaction. "I just wanted express my thanks to the SCTE organisers who facilitated yesterday's meeting at the IEE building. I am a relatively new member and this is my first real involvement with the SCTE. I found the whole day to be a very interesting and enjoyable occasion - excellent presentations, first class lunch and very amiable company." You can download copies of the presentations in the form of PowerPoint SlideShows by right clcking on the names of the papers in the programme, below. There was general agreement that this lecture meeting was one of the most interesting the Society has held. High praise, indeed. The papers indicated that the cable telecommunication industry is entering an exciting time as the question has gone from "Why should I have Broadband?" to "What sort of Broadband shall I have?"		Paul Budgen, Motorola Bernie Cadieux, Sunrise Telecom

John Cook, BT Chris Colman, Sandvine Curtis Knittle, Harmonic	Presentations Summary Opportunities for WiMax, Paul Budgen, Motorola Paul Budgen of Motorola Networks delivered the first session which was on WiMax, a wireless broadband system with much greater coverage than WiFi or Bluetooth. MER & BER measurements in today's cable plants, Bernie Cadieux, Sunrise Telecom, Bernie Cadieux of Sunrise Telecom Broadband who spoke about the relative merits of BER and MER measurements, adding that both were valuable means of assessing network performance, and should be considered jointly for the truest indication of signal quality. Developments in DSL, John Cook, Senior Technology Consultant, BT John Cook of British Telecom spoke about the family of Digital Subscriber Line broadband systems from ISDN to VDSL and the problems of crosstalk between adjacent twisted pairs. The problem is made worse by the possibility of differing systems within the same group of pairs, and the concept of Access Network Spectrum Control as a means of minimising the effects. Network Neutrality: A Broadband Wild West?, Chris Colman, Sandvine Chris drew attention to the spectre of network congestion which is arising due to the proliferation of users, not only ‘subscribers’ but of bandwidth hungry applications and third-party ‘freeloaders’. Contention is random and without any means of control, as soon as extra bandwidth is made available it is occupied, and peer-to-peer traffic is the dominant and greediest type. Resource allocation polices the traffic, locates and neutralises worms and viruses and can give short-term boosts to traffic that requires up to 4Mb/s speeds. RF/IP Hybrid Network for Video Delivery over FTTP, Curtis Knittle, Harmonic Inc Dr Curtis Knittle of Harmonic Inc went through an interesting analysis of RF/IP for delivery over Fibre-to-the-Premises. FTTP addresses the ever-increasing demand for broadband high-speed connection to data and entertainment services, triple-play being the key to future successful networks. Video is the major income source and three network architectures emerge as, between them, providing future-proof answers to the age-old network capacity problem. The choices are seen as either an all-IP Passive Optical Network (PON), or an RF Overlay, or a Digital Overlay, the latter being a normal PON plus Gigabit Ethernet.



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