Also today, SCTE•ISBE election results, Harmonic tunes in to fiber, UK government says it'll splash cash on broadband, Bulgarian operator on the chopping block, Aussie Broadband seeks IPO and how an Irish lottery player's delight was put on hold by a broadband outage.
Virgin Media today debuted gigabit broadband to about 100,000 homes in the UK city of Southampton, part of its pledge to bring high-speed connectivity to 15 million homes across the UK by 2021. (Current Southampton average speed is 40 Mbit/s.) The operator is leveraging its DOCSIS 3.1 network and Hub 4 customer premises equipment -- an upgrade to its current Hub 3 router -- which features enhanced WiFi hardware and use extra antennae to simultaneously manage multiple connected devices. Called Gig1, the service costs £62 per month ($76.37) for at minimum service period of two years. The new service is provisioned over existing coax connections, according to Virgin Media, which adds that another city will get the service within "a few weeks."
Hub 4: The Next Generation
With the DOCSIS 3.1 router, Virgin Media added antennae and other features designed to support multiple users and applications, such as cloud gaming, streaming video and smart-home IoT devices.
Tom Adams, EVP of Field Operations at Charter Communications and former vice chair, is the newly elected chairman of the SCTE•ISBE (International Society of Broadband Experts) board for the 2019-20 term. His vice chair is Kevin Hart, EVP and chief product and technology officer at Cox Communications. Returning board members include Meena Soleiman, VP of Finance and Business Operations at Comcast and Steve Williams, VP of DOCSIS Network Operations at Charter. Out-going chair is Bill Warga, VP of Technology at Liberty Global. The SCTE•ISBE, which is the global arm of The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), provides training and certification services to cable network engineers. (See SCTE•ISBE Elects Charter, Cox Execs to Chair, Vice Chair Positions.)
Harmonic added support for 10G EPON and XGS-PON to CableOS, its virtualized platform for broadband access networks. These FTTP-facing options are intended to leverage CableOS' cloud-native, containerized design and advance beyond the vendor's original focus on DOCSIS and the cable modem termination system (CMTS), wrote Light Reading's Jeff Baumgartner. As cable operators like Comcast and Altice increasingly embrace FTTP networks, vendors want to stay relevant and operators want to ensure investments remain viable. Harmonic plans to demo the new remote OLT FTTP at the SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans this week: Follow Light Reading for further coverage from the show. (See Harmonic's 'CableOS' adds more fiber to its diet .)
As part of the ruling political party's efforts to woo British voters, UK Chancellor Sajid Javid told Conservative Party conference attendees in Manchester he's put aside £5 billion ($6.1 billion) toward high-speed broadband and mobile coverage, including 5G, for remote regions of the UK, the BBC reported today. The goal now encompasses 20% of the UK's hardest to reach areas, double the earlier target of 10%, although the Conservatives (a.k.a. the Tories) have not confirmed a deadline to meet this goal, the BBC said. Or said on which money tree these funds are going to grow...
Another week, another operator up for sale, reports Light Reading, citing the Financial Times (subscription required): This time, Bulgaria's Vivacom finds itself in the middle of a tussle between two private equity firms. United Group and Providence Equity Partners launched indicative bids for Bulgaria's largest operator, which businessman Spas Roussev is seeking to offload.
ISP Aussie Broadband, which offers services based on Australian wholesaler nbn's network, is preparing to go public on the ASX Boards following a pre-IPO capital raise of A$25 million (US$17 million).
Here's one very pleasing broadband service ROI story: An Irish woman, who requested anonymity from the Irish Times, was unable to check her lottery numbers online last Saturday evening, as was her habit, because of a broadband service outage in her area. Once service was resumed, a day later, she checked her numbers and was "gobsmacked" to find she had won €5,325,592 (about $5.8 million). It's not known whether she will spend any of her winnings on churning to another service provider...
Democratic lawmakers in the House Energy & Commerce committee are pressing the likes of Comcast, Altice USA, Charter, Cox and T-Mobile to detail their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vendor says low-cost coax testing device enables customers to verify a coax outlet before calling tech support and should help operators reduce unnecessary truck rolls and service calls.
As the Senior Digital Experience Strategist at Canadian operator Rogers Communications, Lindsey Omelon build on her years of marketing experience to approach her strategy with a hybrid ...
There's certainly no shortage of hype around the use of AI in the telecoms sector, but fewer instances of real-world deployments. South Korean national operator KT is one of those ...
Do a Google search of 'artificial intelligence broadband' and you'll get more than 9 million results in less than a second: The sheer volume of content out there shouldn't surprise anyone ...
Comcast, like any other major communications service provider, is undergoing significant changes in the way it grows its business, how it runs its business and the technologies it uses to ...
Today’s access network architecture is under mounting pressure due to a continued surge in the number of connected devices, a proliferation of bandwidth-intensive customer applications and dramatic shifts in usage patterns related to the pandemic, such as work-from-home and e-learning.
Learn why now is the right time for cable operators to build greenfield networks or expand their existing networks with 10G PON, arming customers with high-speed symmetrical broadband. Gain a clear understanding of the drivers impacting the access network and the various approaches being considered to deliver higher speed services. Plus, find out the best practices that operators are employing as they leverage the latest in passive optical technology to future-proof their networks.
Topics to be covered include:
Node + 0 (Fiber Deep)
DOCSIS 3.1, DOCSIS 4.0 (FDX/ESD)
FTTP and 10G PON
XGS-PON, NG-PON2
Provisioning 10G PON within a DOCSIS B/OSS environment
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