Students Use 802.11g To Save Cable Industry

LiquidFun writes "Business undergraduates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business have written an e-business case for one of their case competitions that describes how to use 802.11g wireless technology to distribute cable content, both interactive and broadcast, throughout the home. They mention features like video-on-demand, cable gaming, etc. and even provide enough of the technical specifications necessary to start believing that this could work. They even make available their PowerPoint presentation that they presented to judges from both Cisco & Deloitte Consulting. I'd say a pretty good job for third-year undergrads."

Comments

Good thing they're just students...

[RyanFenton]

Using the huge infrastructure and bandwidth muscle to eliminate satellite TV from the urban and suburban areas by adding more content-rich and interactive features beyond the bandwidth that satellite TV is capable of handling.

Lines like these might perk the interest of regulators.

Ryan Fenton

Text incase of Slashdotting

[acposter]

Introduction
This project is a plan to incorporate the three primary uses of the existing nationwide cable network, voice, data and video, into one convenient and easy-to-use package that will satisfy most consumers' communication needs at a
fair price.

The long term goal of this project is to maximize shareholder return by becoming the standard by which both urban and suburban American people access these communications mediums. In the short term, the goal is to maintain and increase existing market share by creating a competitive advantage over competitors with overlapping markets using the existing infrastructure.

Detailed Background of Subject

Much money and time has been invested in setting up the infrastructure for a nationwide, high-speed cable network. However, market share has been fragmented between many competitors. Today, the cable industry is fighting a battle with the satellite TV, high-speed DSL internet access, and telco phone service companies. Most of these competitors are more formidable in size and financial health.

Currently, cable is the only medium that can simultaneously offer all three means of communication whereas every other competitor is only able to offer one or two means of communication using its existing infrastructure. Therefore, the cable infrastructure has enormous potential. Despite the possible marketing alliances between satellite television and internet (dial-up and DSL services) companies to provide all three services in conjunction to the consumer, they are still unable to provide these services through a single infrastructure. However, the virtual bundling of these services offered by cable competitors still poses a threat to existing cable market share.

Detailed Problem Explanation
If the cable industry were to continue in its current ways, it would face high churn and a relatively shrinking customer base. Furthermore, the cable industry would lose its opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Factors that contribute to this problem include:

DSL will continue growing twice as fast as cable modems.

Satellite TV would continue convincing cable customers to switch over with more attractive packages.

Cable would never enter the telephone industry due to the customer being used to their existing regional phone services.

While cable operators can expect steep competition from satellite and telecom vendors, Cable currently is the only network architecture of its kind capable of offering not only digital video, high-speed data, and telephony, but other interactive services such as home networking, remote home security monitoring, video conferencing, interactive TV/games, and others. With millions already invested in cable and plant upgrades, many believe that Cable operators are positioned for success if the right decisions are made.

Cable companies must recognize the fact that their infrastructure already contains large amounts of unused capital. This, in effect, translates into a "free" investment, that is, it can use all this extra bandwidth that it has to offer great services at a very low marginal cost.

Competitors have reduced prices of packages which then, combined with free equipment promotions, free installation promotions, and multi-receivers, are compelling packages that are eating up more market share.

Objectives

We envision...

Using the huge infrastructure and bandwidth muscle to eliminate satellite TV from the urban and suburban areas by adding more content-rich and interactive features beyond the bandwidth that satellite TV is capable of handling.

Delivering cable TV, high-speed internet access, telephone with video conferencing, static-free radio, on-demand games and movies, and more through one single medium. Essentially, the cable line becomes the only link needed between the home and the outside world for all cable subscribers.

Offering a local wireless network within each household by which content is distributed, e

Re:Text incase of Slashdotting

[LarsG]

Under the 802.11g wireless standard, which is capable of transmitting data at a rate up to 54mpbs

No, it isn't. Without any interference from other 2.4GHz devices, you can't really expect more than 22Mbps. And that is shared bandwidth - once you have two way connections between the AP and several client devices, they all share the bandwidth. If you have hidden node issues (one client can't hear one of the other clients talking to the AP) you have to go to RTS/CTS mode to avoid collisions which also decrease the effective throughput. There is also no proper QOS in 802.11/b/g, first come first served - on a wireless segment with moderate to heavy load, you can experience lag spikes if several stations wish to transmit at the same time.

The router will also broadcast a connectionless stream under the UDP/IP protocol to devices such as televisions. This connectionless stream will be broadcasted in real-time, continuously, whether a device is "listening" or not, so several devices (e.g. televisions) can simply listen in when they are turned on without having to send a special signal to the box.

Hold on. Will the cable box translate MPEG2 streams received from the cable side to video frames and broadcast those to 802.11g enabled TVs, or will it just broadcast the MPEG2 stream?

In scenario one - have they done the math on how much bandwidth this will require? Not to mention the cost of upgrading your TV to receive raw video frames over 802.11g?

In scenario 2 - have they considered the cost of adding the MPEG2 and 802.11g hardware to the TV? What about MPEG2 artifacts if some frames are lost?

When broadcasting over wireless, you have to take into account the maximum speed of the client with worst signal quality. You can't expect to use 54Mbps modulation if you want the TV at the other end of the house to receive the signal with low packet loss. You can't rely on always being able to use 54Mbps (22Mbps throughput) if you want reliable broadcast to other devices in the household.

What makes cable gaming different from existing gaming networks is that with existing gaming networks, all processing is done locally on the user's own machine. With cable gaming, the required processing is done by the company's machines. This minimizes the actual amount of bandwidth required to travel along physical cable lines, as well as negates the need for a game processor on the consumer end (i.e. a game console; Xbox, Playstation, etc.). The only additional hardware required on the consumer's end is a minimal amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) onboard the digital cable box that acts as buffer memory to ensure a smooth, seamless gaming experience.

Sending complete video frames through the cable net is somehow less bandwidth consuming than sending UDP packets containing the state of the game? Even assuming an MPEG2 video stream, I don't buy that without seeing hard numbers. I would also worry a bit about latency.

The idea to use available bandwidth on the cable to provide new services is intriguing, and should definately be explored. But I think that the engineering needed to make something like this work is a bit higher than what the paper assumes.

Re:Impressions...

[dnoyeb]

I agree, nice to see the thought and work put into this, but their are some obvious issues.

1st, cable and DLS are equal once within the house. This would not give cable any advantage over DSL.

2nd, this does not affect those who use Satellite because cable is unwilling to service them, not incapable.

3rd, security will not exist. Remember, the demand for hacks will skyrocket once you put it into each house. plus its wireless. Thats just asking to be hacked... Cable companies will have to spend MUCHO $$$ to prevent this on a yearly basis. You know, like they did with the cable box upgrades every 2 years, only much more agressively.

4th, 802.x works nice in a ranch house, but it will not like going through floors. It will loose lots of bandwidth there.

If you ignored competition, I think this would be an excellent idea, but I do not see it as a competitive one.

Re:Missed bandwidth by a few orders of magnitude

[drinkypoo]

Uh, Digital CATV uses similar-to-DVD bitrate MPEG2 encoded streams. They are not 30Mbps. They are more like 6Mbps. They still won't fit into 802.11G, but not by the factor that you suggest.

Incidentally, analog cable channels are 8MHz wide. Not that it's part of this discussion, but DOCSIS cable uses that 8MHz and gets max theoretical peak speeds of 45Mbps. Just for comparison.

This Isn't New...

[ignipotentis]

The Moxi Media Center is an old idea. It was designed to use 802.11a. The only difference is these students switched the .a to the .g...

Why are we supposed to be impressed again?

Re:Missed bandwidth by a few orders of magnitude

[isdnip]

The students' proposal was for broadcasting unused, as well as watched, channels over the 802.11g. What you suggest is more sensible, but would require the cable box to act as a smarter server. I was pointing out that the student paper did not address this issue appropriately.

In North America, channels are 6 Mbps wide; 8 Mbps is European-standard, both video and DOCSIS. Digital Cable takes a 6 Mbps channel, runs QAM in it to get about 20 Mbps, and then feeds about ten MPEG streams through it (bit rate of each can be adjusted depending on content).

Real cable is typically a mix of analog and digital channels. Digitizing is costly, so putting analog channels onto digital wireless would take some effort.