Cable operators preparing to test and deploy the industry’s Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) next-generation access architecture face a number of unresolved operational, organizational and training issues, said leading cable engineers. They advised operators to tackle these issues before installing new CCAP equipment in central headends. They recommended that other cable operators follow Comcast’s recent example (CD Sept 18 p8) in running operational trials before actually testing and deploying CCAP gear, designed to combine the functions of the now-separate cable modem termination system (CMTS) and edge QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) devices in one super-dense, more efficient, less costly platform.
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GENEVA -- African and Arab common proposals for the World Conference on International Telecommunications variously call for ITU treaty language to address certain service providers or to spur investment, representatives said Monday during a briefing on revising the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) in December. Common proposals from the Americas and Europe pressed high-level principles.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has reached out to Department of Defense officials first hand on making more spectrum available for wireless broadband, he said in a press conference following the FCC’s meeting Friday. DOD is a major spectrum user and a key player in talks with federal officials over freeing up more spectrum for sharing or reallocating for a future auction. Half the meeting had a wireless focus, with the FCC approving an order designed to spur greater use of microwave for wireless backhaul. The meeting was the third August session in a row where the commission addressed wireless backhaul rules.
GENEVA -- World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) decisions will safeguard spectrum needed to observe and understand the Earth, atmosphere and oceans and to reduce the risk of weather, climate and water-related disasters, the World Meteorological Organization said in a press release following the four-week conference. The growing importance of collecting and exchanging Earth observation data was an important issue before the conference, said Hamadoun Toure, ITU secretary-general, at a press conference. Toure was referring to boosting the accuracy of weather forecasting, climate change monitoring, disaster prediction and mitigation, and gains in other areas.
"Many still hesitate before the Cloud,” Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Extensive consultation with cloud providers, users and consumers shows continuing worries about what services they're buying, personal data protection, whether they can switch providers easily, and whether cloud contracts can be legally enforced, her written speech said. Issues such as standards, certification, data protection and interoperability are particularly nettlesome for smaller companies who stand to benefit most from cloud services but who lack the resources to negotiate individually with providers, she said. The European Commission is determined to overcome those barriers, she said. It has just proposed updated privacy laws but can do more, she said. Public sector information technology procurement is massive but fragmented; buying power can be harnessed through more harmonization, integration and joint procurement across borders, she said. That’s important because the cloud sector will “listen and adapt,” creating benefits for cloud adoption throughout Europe’s economy, she said. She invited public authorities and industry to join a “European Cloud Partnership” that will develop common standards, security and competition requirements for cloud procurement, and then deliver proof-of-concept solutions. The EC will launch the initiative with an initial investment of 10 million euros ($13 million), with first results due in 2013, she said. Later, public bodies on the local, regional or EU member level might find it useful to develop the system further to increase pooling of resources and, ultimately, joint procurement, she said. A similar program for the U.S. federal administration is in place, and a group of European scientific institutions is working on an analogous project, she said. But Europe faces a more complex landscape than the U.S., so it will take more commitment and energy to get there, she said. Kroes stressed the partnership won’t be a “European super-Cloud” but will be driven by market considerations.
The ITU study group on the broadcasting service will begin new studies of “worldwide broadcasting roaming” and make changes to work in three other areas, unless objections arise before Jan. 27, the director of the Radiocommunication Bureau said in a letter to administrations. Worldwide broadcasting roaming may spur regional, national and international harmonization of broadcasting, it said, and offers the possibility of intersystem interoperability for information services in disaster and emergency situations, navigation and safety. Demand for portable broadcast receivers is rising worldwide, it said. Those devices are increasingly connected to the Internet and are based on loaded software or firmware that can be updated, it said. The work aims to define the service requirements and features for worldwide broadcasting roaming, needed characteristics and performance, and the technical characteristics of broadcast receivers including elements of software defined radio (SDR) and its enhancements that may be useful, it said. SDR is also being studied in ITU-R, it said. Revisions to existing work include the inclusion of extremely high resolution or multi-view TV, and 3DTV, in studies on generic bit-rate reduction coding of digital video signals for production, contribution, primary and secondary distribution, emission and related applications, it said. Work on broadcasting of multimedia and data applications, and digital interfaces for production and post-production applications in broadcasting systems, will include 3DTV, it said.
ILECs and VoIP providers urged the FCC to steer clear of further e-911 location accuracy requirements. Emergency responders’ groups and locator companies said the commission should go even further in its rules. The comments in docket 07-114 came in a commission rulemaking to require nomadic VoIP providers to automatically send out addresses in connection with emergency calls.
NTIA will propose legislation that would provide funding to help identify spectrum that might be ripe for commercial use, the agency said in its long-awaited “Plan and Timetable to Make Available 500 Megahertz of Spectrum for Wireless Broadband,” released Monday. NTIA laid out a schedule for identifying additional bands for reallocation over the next five years, committing to identify the first band for additional analysis in January. The agency also released a report on 115 MHz of spectrum already considered for fast-track reallocation.
House Oversight Committee leaders seemed poised at a hearing Thursday to act to accelerate government agencies’ transition to Networx. That’s a General Services Administration program under which federal agencies can buy telecom, network and information services. Agencies must sign on to the program by June 2011, the expiration date for the GSA’s old telecom program, FTS2001. The transition is behind schedule for several reasons, said government and industry officials.
The FCC heard a litany of complaints from advocates for people with disabilities Thursday, on the opening panel of the FCC’s Wireless Technology/Disability Access Workshop. They asked the commission to step in and make cellphones more accessible for their members. Wireless Bureau Chief Ruth Milkman and Karen Strauss, deputy chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, assured speakers that the FCC takes their concerns seriously.