FROM THE INDUSTRY connector or a roll-off because there’s a cable damaged. The equipment gives a red, amber, green feedback. Green is, “Everything is good.” Amber is, “The equipment is applying unusual parameters to make the network work, but there is a fault that needs investigation.” The network stays up, but there’s actually a flag for preventive maintenance. So, it’s not that AI is taking our jobs…. There aren’t that many people who want to do that sort of work. Network engineers in North America are an aging workforce. One of our customers tells us more than 50% are 55 to 60. There is a real concern about the base of skills vanishing. They’re very clever craft skill workers who have the attention to detail to identify and fix the problem, go the distance; having equipment which effectively does the same. It steps in and helps, especially since the attention span of people now does seem shorter than with earlier generations. Another point worth noting is that analogue transmissions were switched off, providing more capacity with digital TV and then everything went IP, which gave back another block of capacity, though those dividends are over now. The only way to get more capacity is to put more bandwidth in, which also means networks need upgrading. In many cases the first time for 15 to 20 years – but the upgrades have to have a long life so we consider the upgrades have to be only once – that what we call ‘a one-touch network upgrade’. The network upgrades our customers are doing are good for the next 15 to 20 years. And with limited labour and the cost of reconfiguring a network, this is very, very important. That’s sort of future proofing it, isn’t it? Yes it is. We do flex-split amplifiers, which basically carry upstream or downstream according to differing requirements. When you’re building the network, you don’t know where the ratio between upstream and downstream is going to be. Now it’s probably 10:1 between downstream more because it’s video streaming. What tends to happen with broadband networks is that there’s more upstream becoming needed with very high-resolution home security cameras. It used to be the security camera put video which up into the cloud when a movement was
“In order to grow we need to focus on FTTX, which is probably ten times that globally, and into mobile, which is probably 30 to 50 times that.”
detected when somebody walked around outside your house. Now most cameras are streaming video continuously, so that you have a record of everything. So, the amount of upstream bandwidth being used is growing, but it’s unpredictable as to how far it will go.
Where do you see all this going in five years’ time?
If I’m an operator, selling a 1Gb symmetrical broadband for X pounds per month, it’s probably enough. But if somebody comes along and sells 2Gb or 5Gb for the same price, there’s a chance that I might lose that customer to somebody else. It’s a speed race, which is obviously very important. We’re producing DOCSIS 4.0-ready equipment, which is able to do 10Gb or more. Just over a year ago we did a trial with Vodafone-Ziggo, Netherlands and did 17Gb download speed on a field trial on their actual network. 17Gb! Is that ever going to be necessary? When we started Technetix and we opened our first office in the days of dial- up modems, I installed a 128Kb ISDN line. I remember thinking, “What on earth are we going to do with all this bandwidth?!” 30 years later, we have 2Gb now, and I don’t know what we’ll need next. But I think that with telematics on mobile, and in terms of augmented reality, being able to watch sports events, there will be larger bandwidth requirements. Once you get a 12K screen, 4K to 8K being the current standards, the human eye doesn’t really have any more resolution. However, if you’re doing an augmented reality simulation of being in a sports stadium, you probably need a 100K, so the amount of bandwidth is considerably more. Technetix has come a long way, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done as a company. We’ve grown our engineering; it’s RF and optics with automated control but we’ve got some extremely good technology and extremely good people. And over the last eight years we’ve grown very much into FTTX products. We do a compact OLT for rural broadband and capacity overlay. And since our Canadian acquisition, we’ve now started doing mini mobile base stations for mobile and WiFi access gateways.
Mobile is a new area for us as is cable networks; quite a number of our
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Volume 46 No.2 MAY 2024
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