Business need
Cable operators need to deliver an all-digital lineup to compete with DBS and Telcos, lower new set-top box costs, and pave the way for reclamation of analog spectrum. At the same time, MSOs need to grow the number of SDTV and HDTV channels to satisfy a diverse subscriber population and burgeoning demand for high definition content.Challenges
While providing an all-digital line-up to the digital subscribers, operators can't abandon the vast number of analog subscribers. Of course, it makes no sense to transport in both formats over the metro network. It makes even less sense to add capacity to legacy ASI over SONET/SDH platforms that will eventually run out of steam. You need a more scalable solution to cost-effectively transport and replicate an ever-growing number of SDTV and HDTV broadcast channels without adding latency, jitter or packet-loss in the process.Solution
You can implement an intelligent transport solution today that enables the scalable, efficient transport of broadcast channels once to each hub and use analog regeneration equipment there to simulcast the basic line-up in analog format over the HFC plant.Ciena's offerings
Ciena’s Optical Ethernet solution allows you to insert the full programming line-up into the transport network over one or two protected GbE ports at the headend. From there, the platform provides uni-directional, protected drop-and-continue transport to reliably deliver the programming to every hub using a single copy. Using Layer 1 multicast, the solution avoids the cost of either sending a separate copy for each hub or interconnecting routers from hub-to-hub and using Layer 3 multicast. This adds essentially no latency or jitter and provides much greater manageability than legacy AM fiber distribution schemes.Benefits
- Minimizes broadcast transport bandwidth for simulcast of analog channels
- Scale your network cost-effectively to deliver more niche and HDTV channels
- Cost-effectively integrates hub-and-spoke delivery of narrowcast services with ring-based multicast of broadcast services
- Provides SONET/SDH-like performance monitoring and fault signaling for 99.999% availability
