Traffic Engineering in a Fiber Deep Gigabit World

The introduction of Gbps service is dramatically changing cable broadband. Many new innovations are finding their way into cable operators’ plants and many others are on the way. With DOCSIS® 3.1 depl..

John Ulm portrait

By John Ulm
Engineering Fellow, ARRIS

The introduction of Gbps service is dramatically changing cable broadband. Many new innovations are finding their way into cable operators’ plants and many others are on the way. With DOCSIS® 3.1 deployments well underway and DOCSIS Full Duplex (FDX) on the horizon, operators have the promise of symmetric Gigabit services. At the same time, some operators are starting their migration to fiber deep networks while others are looking at Distributed Access Architectures (DAA) such as Remote PHY. All of this will have significant impact on the way operators manage their traffic engineering and network capacity planning.

During SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo® 2017, at the session, “Traffic Engineering Optimization II,” I’ll be discussing the ramifications of these issues and the significant impact they will have on the way operators manage their traffic engineering and network capacity planning. Attendees at this session will also hear from Jeff Finkelstein, Executive Director of Advanced Technology, Cox, and Dr. Claudio Righetti, Chief Scientist & Security, Cablevision S.A. Argentina.

As an industry, we need to re-evaluate and update our models, starting with an intimate understanding of customer bandwidth behavior. I will discuss our recent research in this area and show interesting results from live plants. For example, we have seen an extremely wide range in capacity utilization between different customers, even within the same service tier. I will also highlight the impact on Service Group (SG) performance, This deep understanding of customer bandwidth behavior then allowed us to develop a more QoE centric traffic engineering model that operators can use to guarantee user satisfaction.

Join us on Wednesday, October 18th at 10:45am MT in room 205/207.