DOCSIS 3.0: Savior for Cable, Spark for OSS

Financially and politically it would be suicide to tear out and rebuild the hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) plant that the cable industry built in the late ’90s, so the industry has placed its hopes on a multifeatured IP specification, DOCSIS 3.0, and the next-generation management tools it allows.

This evolutionary specification, developed by the R&D consortium at CableLabs, provides a road map without needing a rebuild, said Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corp. during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “It is going to give us an ability to innovate and add more creative products for video, on the data side and on the communications front.”

DOCSIS 3.0 builds on top of the preceding DOCSIS 2.0 (aka PacketCable) with five major features:

• Channel bonding to mash together multiple channels and create a fat bandwidth pipe.
• IPv6 to provide more IP addresses as IPv4 becomes exhausted.
• Business and operations support systems (B/OSS) enhancements through IP Data Records (IPDR) to mine more in-depth Internet usage information.
• IP multicasting to define an IPTV migration path.
• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to enhance security for key business customers.

Top-level cable execs are leaning on vendors and standards organizations to push through certified DOCSIS 3.0 equipment, which will have immediate and long-term impacts on BSS and OSS.

“There are a whole lot of OSS issues with being able to provision [creative] services, such as how you monitor those services, their fault tolerance, troubleshooting, trouble ticketing,” said Kelly Neiman, head of the cable markets sector for the TM Forum. “It’s a very hardy upgrade to their infrastructure so the MSOs will do it in phases. The issue overall with the OSS is looking at it as a whole and not in iterative steps.”

The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) was developed by CableLabs as an evolutionary, backward-compatible specification, so it’s logical that DOCSIS 3.0 is “an a la carte thing where MSOs will deploy features on a one-by-one basis,” said Brian Hedstrom, senior OSS engineer at CableLabs. “From a back-office perspective, IPv6 would have the most effect on applications.”

IPv6 High on the List

IPv6 probably won’t be the first feature cable operators roll out because most MSOs aren’t yet feeling the IP address pinch. However, its impact may be felt most immediately by some of the larger MSOs, top dog MSO Comcast in particular, that have exhausted their supply of IPv4 addresses.

On a basic level, IPv6 substantially expands the number of fields within a data stream so the OSS vendor must know how to represent this information in the database as well as pass it out to the appropriate interfaces, particularly billing.