Alcatel-Lucent announces cable operators get the Edge on capacity & cost

Take a look at your cable company's offerings today and compare them to the recent past. I think you will be surprised by the variety of services, programming, viewing options and more. There is so much choice, and changes are coming at such a rapid pace that it's extraordinary. And yet we, subscribers, seem to never get enough. That's exactly the challenge that cable operators face: they have already realized enormous changes and yet there is still demand for more.

Time Warner Cable Senior Director and Chief Network Architect Michael S. Kelsen writes in the preface to our new White Paper Transforming the Network Edge in the Cable Hub that "cable operators are seeing their network capacity requirements double approximately every 24 months to keep up with customer demand and the launch of new services." The focus now, he writes, is to maintain this high growth rate while managing costs.

Flexible Hub Architecture

One of the best options to maintain growth and manage costs is to reduce costs at the edge of the network – and it's an approach that cable operators are driving. In my opinion this approach directly addresses the largest and fastest growing cost for cable operators, and it's an area where Alcatel-Lucent is able to leverage its IP routing expertise to help simplify the network and bring some clear advantages.

"Cable operators can consolidate development efforts on fewer platforms when those platforms are designed from the beginning to accommodate growth and are better suited for advanced routing environments," Kelsen added in his preface. And I agree: what's needed is a flexible hub architecture at the cable edge.

This flexible hub architecture in the cable edge will support the evolution of residential, commercial and even mobile services with both massive scale and service awareness, which the operator can then use to differentiate its offerings from competitors. It's also a simplified architecture that will reduce CAPEX and OPEX.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

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