CEA Again Questioning BBT On FCC’s Separable-Security Rules
The CEA, a stalwart supporter of the CableCARD, is fighting a request by vendor Evolution Broadband for a waiver from the CableCARD rule for certain stripped-down digital boxes (CED June 18 p9). And it again raised questions about whether a planned box from Beyond Broadband Technology (BBT) would comply with FCC separable security rules.
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“We're essentially asking the commission to be diligent and apply some scrutiny to these, particularly where someone asks for a whole class of technology to be declared to be free from having to meet the separable security requirement,” said Brian Markwalter, CEA vice president of technology and standards.
Markwalter met separately with Media Bureau Chief Monica Desai and aides to Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein, Robert McDowell and Michael Copps to attempt to refute assertions made in a recent ex parte notice filed by BBT’s counsel. That notice said Martin indicated no further commission action was needed for operators that wanted to use the BBT downloadable security system. “It’s unusual to document your interpretation of the chairman’s view and not what you told the commission, which is the normal way to do an ex parte,” Markwalter said in an interview. CEA told FCC officials it doubted such a conclusion “could possibly be drawn from any full and accurate description of the BBT system, or any other competing ‘downloadable’ security system,” the ex parte filing shows.
The commission won’t have to act on the BBT system, said Steve Effros, a consultant to BBT. “They have said repeatedly to us that no waiver is needed,” he said. “And I don’t think they want to get in the way of this new technology.”
But the last time the FCC officially spoke of the BBT system, it was questioning its openness, Markwalter said. Desai asked Jet Broadband in July 2007 to submit detailed information about how open the BBT system would be to other vendors and manufacturers. BBT responded in August saying it is developing the technology in a way that is more similar to the industry consortium model that led to DOCSIS than the open standards model of IEEE. The system would be developed more quickly this way by a small, secure group and shared “only after full NDA [non-disclosure agreements] are in place and security is assured,” BBT CEO William Bauer wrote at the time.
BBT’s system can’t be interoperable with competitive devices unless the BBT chip were to be put on a CableCARD and rely on the CableCARD interface, CEA said in an ex parte. “Any cable operator deploying the BBT system would in fact lock out competitive devices unless it deployed the system on CableCARDs,” it said (emphasis in original).