Cable Operators See Promise in Small-Cell Wireless Backhaul
Cable engineers and executives voted a wireless backhaul product the most likely to be adopted among new products displayed at a CableLabs showcase this week. BelAir Networks’ wireless picocell base station, which would let cable operators use their DOCSIS broadband networks to provide small-cell backhaul for licensed and unlicensed wireless use, beat out various IP video and interactive TV products. They were said to make up the dominant theme of the showcase. Executives stressed that the poll, conducted as each of a dozen startups and established cable vendors demonstrated their products, wasn’t a scientific survey, but the results show how interested cable operators are in exploiting the wireless backhaul opportunity. “We all feel the pain that BelAir is looking to help solve, and we as MSOs are looking to participate in that solution of being able to get coverage at spots and capacity at specific locations,” said Mark Coblitz, Comcast’s senior vice president of strategic planning. Comcast is an investor in BelAir.
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The BelAir product would let cable operators work with wireless carriers to improve capacity and coverage in densely populated areas by creating large numbers of small wireless cells, said Vice President David Park. “It opens up whole new business models for MSOs,” he said, “whether that happens to be hosted base station or an MVNO deal or any kind of wireless interaction.” Cable operators that own wireless spectrum could also use the cells for their own service or offer Wi-Fi service over unlicensed spectrum, he said. Operators are already deploying this type of equipment to offer Wi-Fi to its broadband customers, Coblitz said. “To be able to add the licensed spectrum to it is a real business opportunity.”
Of the companies that presented to CableLabs, BelAir was the only one that offered a wireless product, said Charter Communications Chief Technology Officer Marwan Fawaz. The rest mainly focused on new IP video technologies to bring cable services to more CE devices, he said. “Operators are moving forward with different iterations on how to meet the customers demand” for video on more devices, said Louis Toth, senior managing director at Comcast Interactive Capital, that cable operator’s venture arm. “All of that is still in evolution. You do have a number of start-up companies that are beginning to attack that problem, but it is all relatively new."
3D video technologies were absent from the demonstrations. In part that’s because 3D is difficult to demonstrate to a roomful of 300 engineers, said CableLabs Chief Strategy Officer David Reed. “I wouldn’t use that as a barometer that there’s less interest in 3D than there might otherwise be,” he said. “But this might not be the best platform to showcase 3D technology."
Among the other technologies demonstrated were an on-screen widget store from Pace that could incorporate applications from Skype and Facebook onto existing set-top boxes, a Tru2way product from Alticast and multi-screen viewing technologies from Alcatel-Lucent, ActiveVideo Networks, BigBand Networks, Digital Keystone, Netgear, Panasonic and Widevine. The variety of technology options is good for operators, said Fawaz. “There are different middlewares that allow us to put those devices on [the network] in a quicker time to market than we've had initially,” he said. “That’s a further testament that the interactive TV world is really starting to explode.”