The cable industry’s current expenditures of approximately $1 Billion per year are based on simple upgrades of the network to accommodate higher data speeds. Most operators use 2-3 channels to support maximum data speeds of 50 Mb\/s to 100 Mb\/s. However, the expenditures to support upcoming high amounts of video traffic will necessarily be much greater, because while data streams are quite bursty, video streams require a high bit rate for much longer periods of time. This phenomenon is called persistency. Data persistency is routinely 5% while video persistency can easily be 50%. As video traffic continues to grow, this means that significantly more CMTS<\/a> downstream channels will be required to carry this video content. Based on today’s market, it is likely that industry expenditures for CMTS expansion could exceed $2 Billion annually, virtually all of this expenditure being driven by video traffic. If vIP PASS were universally adapted for carrying the majority of this traffic, it could save the industry approximately 75% of this CapEx expense.<\/p>\n The answer to this can be found in previous technological disruptions. vIP PASS is a combination of a software control plane and a high volume, low-cost universal edge QAM. While a CMTS could make use of low-cost edge QAMs, it is inherently a relatively specialized, hardware platform. Even in next-generation CMTS’s the question is whether a hardware device can meet the price of a software server. For example, n telephony soft switches became the technology of choice for new services and capacity expansion over hardware-based Class 5 switches. vIP PASS can be thought of as a video Softswitch alternative to hardware-based CMTS’s. Older CMTS’s won’t go away, rather vIP PASS is an excellent complement to the CMTS for carrying new, highly demanding video traffic most economically and flexibly.<\/p>\n vIP PASS is not intended to replace the CMTS, but rather to complement it by carrying the high bandwidth demanding video streams sent to subscribers. Since the upstream traffic generated by subscribers for video content consists of simple low-speed channel changes and program requests, there is no need to add any upstream bandwidth to accommodate this meager traffic. Even a DOCSIS 1.0 CMTS can accommodate this upstream traffic generated by channel change and program requests without the need for any new upstreams. Therefore, the incremental upstream cost of implementing vIP PASS is $0.<\/p>\nWon’t the price of CMTS’s come down to equal vIP PASS?<\/h3>\n
Doesn’t your comparison of vIP PASS pricing to CMTS pricing leave out a major component ? the CMTS return path?<\/h3>\n