EMMANUEL VELLA HFC MIGRATION
UPGRADING THE HFC NETWORK: THE JOURNEY TOWARDS 10G
At current growth rates, internet services, including data-intensive gaming, virtual reality and OTT HD video, combined with today’s digital TV services will consume the entire capacity of today’s hybrid fibre coax (HFC) networks in just a few years. Networks must start evolving now to survive. The events of the last six months have given us all an unprecedented view of what the future of network bandwidth demand has in store, writes Emmanuel Vella , VP Sales N&C Europe at CommScope.
F rom our conversations the world has been in varying stages of lockdown. Firstly, heavy network demand, which previously would spike between 8pm-12am (4 hours) now occurs from 8am-2am (18 hours). with customers and peers and through our devices in the field, we’ve seen two main trends emerge from the past few months when Also, downstream traffic has increased by 26-86% during the daytime and by 12-32% at night, while upstream traffic has increased by 30-150% during the day and by 14-50% at night. That is to say, bandwidth is not just spiking, but spiking over much longer periods of time. And for the upstream, those spikes are much higher than they used to be.
for home working, online learning, video conferencing, online gaming, and streaming TV. The learning for cable operators is clear. In the short-term, maximising current capacity can go a long way towards serving the immediate demands of consumers, but the only longer-term solution is to increase the available capacity per subscriber in both the downstream and upstream. The good news is that broadband operators are fully cognisant of these trends and accelerating their pipeline of network upgrades to get ahead of demand and prepare their networks for the future—however it may look. Looking towards the medium-term, industry solutions focus primarily on making large-scale plant and CMTS configuration changes as well as investment in building network capacity. While these revolve around more complex network upgrade strategies, they also have the potential to more broadly boost capacity and strengthen the network. One example
end users is essentially down to good design. Modern broadband networks were rolled out with additional overhead (fitted with extra wiggle room) to prepare for bandwidth bursts from things like file downloads and file uploads… or more extreme scenarios like what we’re going through now. This extra capacity, in tandem with the application of short-term network solutions, is keeping us running and spreading bandwidth use over time, effectively meeting network demand. These solutions include CMTS configuration changes, extensive node segmentation and adding additional DOCSIS 3.1 CMs utilizing OFDMA spectrum to leverage higher spectral efficiencies. Fixes like these are a couple of examples of ways to maximise the current infrastructure and will likely lead to a 5-66% improvement in bandwidth capacity. However, this is not sustainable. We continue to see a 20-30% jump in bandwidth use every year on average, as people leverage more and more connected technology
KEEPING OUR NETWORKS RUNNING
The reason why everything is more or less working as it should with minimal impact on quality of experience for
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| ISSUE 22 | Q4 2020
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