At CableLabs, we talk a lot about the importance of innovation and collaboration. These are the connecting themes in our Technology Vision for the broadband industry to drive competitiveness, scale and alignment while also cultivating technologies for the future.

But there’s another critical piece of the puzzle that comes into play when we talk about the industry’s collective advancements: intellectual property. Specifically, the licensing of patents and software — and how these creative safeguards move broadband technology forward by incentivizing innovation.

Why Are Patents Important?

Patents are a pillar of innovation in tech. They give inventors rights to their creations, allowing them to protect their hard-earned ideas in exchange for sharing the details of their invention with the world and pushing the boundaries of public knowledge. And during the patent protection period, a patent license allows other innovators to create and even build on the original invention. This allows technology to evolve and spark new ideas, even before the patent period ends.

Once the patent's protection runs out, the invention becomes public domain, meaning anyone can use or improve on it freely, fueling further progress. It's a win-win, keeping innovation moving forward!

It’s no surprise that the broadband industry is rife with patents. In fact, as of today, the CableLabs patent portfolio includes more than 850 issued and allowed U.S. patents and 97 foreign-issued patents.

Why Is Licensing Important?

Most standards and specifications carry an associated patent licensing requirement. This means that if you agree to work on and contribute to a specification, you also agree to license your patents that are essential for the specification’s implementation.

Licensing agreements prevent parties from incorporating their patented technology into a specification and later withholding or over-leveraging patent rights against a manufacturer that wants to build products that implement the specification. This is sometimes called patent hold-up, or a patent hold-out.

Adhering to a patent licensing policy establishes a nurturing environment that fosters collaboration, advances development and unifies goals in the industry to ensure the cooperation and interoperability that are critical to innovation advancements. It’s one of the reasons DOCSIS®️ technology was such a success and rapidly adopted, and why it continues to benefit the industry.

Further, in addition to licensing regimes created for specification development, patents and licensing play a pivotal role in broadband technology development more generally, helping industry players navigate a complex legal landscape while contributing to a stronger, healthier ecosystem and ensuring vendor neutrality.

Focusing on the future, CableLabs develops technologies and demonstrates proof-of-concept for innovations that will provide value to our members through an innovation lens that usually targets an impact eight to 10 years out. Developed to benefit the industry as a whole, CableLabs’ patented technologies are available for our member operators to leverage at any time.

Since our first intellectual property license in 1998, CableLabs has made it a tenet of our mission to enable the vendor ecosystem to deliver interoperable, competitive solutions. Licensing also reduces the litigation risk for vendors who contribute to the work we do.

Gridmetrics Available for Licensing

Gridmetrics, which evolved from a project incubated at CableLabs, uses existing broadband infrastructure to deliver actionable insights about the state of power in the last mile of the distribution grid. By providing an out-of-band measurement of the quality and consistency of the power grid, Gridmetrics data can be leveraged for outage detection, power restoration, grid safety and voltage variability.

Gridmetrics is now on a path to expanding its market reach. CableLabs’ research is complete, and licensing of the technology’s intellectual property is available.

Contact us using the button below to discuss licensing opportunities and learn how to join us in our work to achieve this vision for the industry. We’re excited to help put CableLabs’ technologies to work for you!

The ways we create and consume visual media are constantly evolving, allowing us to experience places and things as if we’re physically present in those environments. Today, thanks to a fast-growing technology called a Neural Radiance Field ("NeRF"), anyone with a regular camera can make and share "3D photographs" of the real world. NeRFs have been around since the 2020 publication of Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis, but recent developments have made it easier than ever to start making immersive 3D media.

If you’ve ever viewed a 3D house tour or a 3D piece of furniture on an e-commerce website, you might be wondering: What makes NeRF unique? The answer is that NeRF introduces unprecedented photorealistic detail, including the ability to see reflections and transparencies like never before. You can see an example of NeRF in this capture created by our intern, Tyler McCormick:

NeRF makes high-quality 3D content creation fast and intuitive. CableLabs' Immersive Media Experiences team has been following the developments surrounding NeRF and other forms of immersive media to understand how these technologies transform the ways we live, learn, work and play. In time, immersive applications may emerge as major drivers of network traffic, so we’re working to understand the resources required to deliver these next-generation experiences.

In this blog post, we take a look at how NeRF works, how to use it yourself and how it’s influencing the future of immersive media.

NeRF in a Nutshell: How It Works

Essentially, NeRF is a machine learning system that takes photos or videos of a subject and memorizes the appearance of that subject in 3D. The NeRF-creation process looks something like this:

1. Record a regular video or take a set of photos of your subject. Your phone will do!
2. Take each of those images and figure out their positions relative to each other. You can do this with sensors fixed to the camera or, more easily, with an AI pipeline such as COLMAP.
3. Train a multi-layer perceptron (a kind of neural network) to behave like a renderer that’s specialized at producing images of this subject.
4. Now, you have a NeRF! You can use this neural network to create new images and videos of your subject, as in the above example.

When NeRF was first published in 2020, this creation process took hours. Today, advancements such as NVIDIA’s Instant Neural Graphics Primitives have brought the time down to the order of minutes or even seconds!

When we called NeRF a “3D photograph” earlier, we meant it. Essentially, a NeRF tries to describe the color and density of light emitted at each point in a 3D space. If you look at the same point of a real object from various angles, you might see different colors and densities. NeRF reproduces this effect to achieve reflections and transparencies, just as if you were viewing a real 3D object.

The NeRF process results in a high level of detail, but there’s one catch: The NeRF model assumes that you’re working with a still, unchanging scene. Light-based effects are “baked in,” meaning that you can’t add new objects to the scene and see them cast shadows or appear in reflections. If subjects move or change over time in the input video, the NeRF output will appear blurry or misshapen. New research papers have identified ways around these limitations, but those solutions haven’t yet reached wider adoption. In the meantime, anyone want to bring back the Mannequin Challenge?

Getting Started

It’s easy to start playing with NeRF. For example, Luma AI has built an app for iPhones and the web that automatically builds NeRFs from your videos. Once you have a NeRF, you can make videos and export them to other content-creation tools, including the Unreal game engine. Luma has a gallery of diverse NeRF-based content submitted by their users here.

If you want to take a more hands-on approach to NeRF creation, nerfstudio is a free, open-source toolset for creating NeRFs and designing advanced 3D graphics pipelines with the new technology. The learning curve is steeper, but power users and developers may enjoy the increased flexibility that this method offers.

NeRF and Next-Generation Media

Improved 3D capture of real-world subjects opens up opportunities across multiple industries. Here are a few examples.

Digital productions and VFX artists are already finding ways to incorporate NeRF into creative workflows. The most obvious use in content creation is converting real-world subjects to 3D representations that can be combined with synthetic content, but NeRF can also be used to smooth camera movements or compose multiple camera shots into unified sequences. To see for yourself, check out this Corridor Crew video on YouTube and this McDonald’s commercial about the Chinese New Year (including the additional behind-the-scenes content in the replies).

Digital twins and simulations, as described by platforms like NVIDIA Omniverse, have presented a compelling value proposition for accurate digital modeling of real-world systems such as factories and autonomous vehicles. Where applicable, NeRF may be an effective way to digitize real-world environments for use in models and simulations. One example in the wild is Wayve Technologies’ effort to build city-scale NeRFs for autonomous vehicle simulations, as presented at NVIDIA GTC 2023.

Finally, metaverse initiatives often aim to empower users to build and share their own content and experiences. Games like Minecraft and Roblox provide user-friendly content-creation tools, but photorealistic content creation is usually reserved for experts with training on professional tools or access to specialized photogrammetry software. Now, cloud-hosted apps like Luma and nerfstudio make it possible to generate photorealistic content in minutes with your smartphone and a network connection.

NeRF Is Accelerating Immersive Media

Immersive media comes in many forms, including but not limited to virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and light field displays. NeRF alone isn’t going to make or break any of these technologies as they continue to mature and enter the market, but it gives creators and developers another tool to get one step closer to a photorealistic holographic immersive experience.

In the past, we’ve asked readers to imagine that we had a way to capture life-like holograms of subjects. Thanks to NeRF and related technologies, there's no need for make-believe. Subscribe to our blog for more updates from the Immersive Media Team and other activities at CableLabs.

Innovation isn’t just about creating new products. It’s about bringing together diverse thoughts, perspectives and experiences to solve big problems. At Innovation Boot Camp, CableLabs members and employees work together in an intimidation-free zone to immerse themselves in the innovative process, from inspiration to final pitch.

During the week of April 24–28, 2023, CableLabs will host the 20th Innovation Boot Camp, where innovators will receive hands-on experience and live coaching from CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney and other expert speakers and coaches. In this spring’s all-virtual format, participants will learn the FIRE framework (Focus, Ideation, Ranking, and Execution), experience the innovation process end to end; and learn strategies that they can apply to their own teams and projects immediately.

It’s an inspiring environment designed to bring the industry closer together and share new ways of creating and innovating.

But do any of the ideas developed at Innovation Boot Camp actually make it to market? Yes, they do.

A Market-Ready Solution to a Real-World Problem

Innovation Boot Camp pulls out all the stops to help participants tackle real issues that they’re facing in their businesses or other contexts. The innovative process we teach is designed to generate ideas that result in viable solutions, many of which have gone on to production.

One of those ideas was Kyrio’s ARC HotSpot, a technology that delivers automated failover for broadband networks. The idea for ARC HotSpot was born out of the 2020 Innovation Boot Camp, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies urgently needed reliable remote-work solutions. By holding the very first virtual Innovation Boot Camp in the midst of this new world of work, CableLabs gave participants an opportunity to collaborate and innovate despite lockdown restrictions.

The challenge of the 2020 Innovation Boot Camp was to come up with a technology idea that would make working from home a better experience. Participants learned from veteran coaches, then broke into teams to begin the ideation process. One of those teams was Team Echo, which consisted of CableLabs employees from various backgrounds and areas of expertise, including CableLabs’ Director of Procurement Zen Mykytyn.

During a brainstorming session, Zen observed that one of the most difficult challenges of navigating virtual work and school was keeping everyone connected during a service outage. With two parents working from home and kids logged in to Zoom classrooms, even a short outage resulted in house-wide panic as meetings were disrupted and no one could do their work.

But what if there was a technology that could solve that problem?

Zen’s observation was the spark that launched a week of brainstorming, iterating, investigating and developing the idea that eventually became ARC HotSpot.

From Inspiration to Pitch

With the idea in hand, Zen and the other members of Team Echo started developing a solution. Coached by John Bahr, the team came up with the idea of using a smartphone as a hotspot for the entire home network. They conducted a live customer experience conversation to get real feedback on the idea, put together a one-sheet and a storyboard, and developed a pitch that they would present to the Innovation Boot Camp panel at the end of the week.

“CableLabs’ Innovation Boot Camp, while a fun learning experience, is also a place where game-changing ideas happen,” said coach John Bahr. “My team came up with a solution to a problem that was at the forefront of real customers’ minds during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. Executing on that solution to turn it into a real product was just so cool!”

At the end of the week, Team Echo pitched their idea over Zoom. Just a few short minutes after Zen began presenting, his connection dropped. One of the other team members picked up the pitch as everyone waited for Zen to re-establish his connection. It was a brilliant, planned demonstration of the exact use case that made the team’s idea so relevant, and the panel agreed it was an idea worth pursuing.

After Innovation Boot Camp ended, John Bahr gave a demonstration that generated significant interest. Kyrio non-exclusively licensed the intellectual property from CableLabs and developed its own implementation, and ARC HotSpot was born.

Innovation Is a Team Sport

Zen strongly believes that the positive, nurturing environment of Innovation Boot Camp and the diversity of the team made it possible for his idea to come to fruition.

“My team included John Bahr, Greg White and Mark Bridges,” he said. “They’re all really smart guys and experts in their fields, but they’re all different. My field isn’t technical thinking or awareness, but working with them gave me a glimpse into what they do every day and how they think. My idea wouldn’t have come to be without the rest of the team.”

That diversity of experience lies at the heart of Innovation Boot Camp’s mission. We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere—and they do. Innovation is a team sport that thrives when diverse thinkers come together in an intimidation-free environment to make things better.

If you’re looking for a hands-on experience that puts words and ideas into action, Innovation Boot Camp is ideal for you. You’ll learn to challenge your thinking, develop new skills and put those skills into action as you work with a team of other innovators.

Ready to see what it’s all about? Join us for the next CableLabs Innovation Boot Camp. Spots are limited, and innovation topics do vary.

How we experience the digital world is about to get a whole lot more exciting. The newest film in the “Near Future” series shows what a day in the life of a family looks like as technology transforms how they work, study and engage with each other. Imagine interacting with virtual people and places that feel real and propel you into new worlds. This is the future that the “Step Inside” film explores—and it’s not that far off.

Immersive Media

In the film, a virtual 3D talking rabbit and a lifelike prowling tiger enhance the children’s learning and play through an immersive experience. With holographic and light field technologies, characters come to life with realistic depth and presence so that the family can interact with them.

Light Field Displays

Imagine 3D displays that don’t require special glasses or headsets. This is what the main character, Clara, experiences when she’s in the meeting with her investors and they can exchange glances. With light field technology, multiple people can view the same thing at the same time using displays on walls, tabletops or even entire stage floors.

Holographic Telepresence

As Clara is briefed on a developing hurricane, she and her remote team can observe the storm’s pathway simultaneously via a life-size holographic projection. Holographic telepresence technology allows multiple users to experience the same three-dimensional media at the same time and from different angles. Clara also presents remotely to her board members as if they are all in the same room together. With holographic telepresence, it’s easier to build bonds and create deeper connections. These holograms are three-dimensional images formed by the interference of light beams from lasers or other light sources.

Advanced AI Avatars

In the film, Clara’s assistant helps her prepare for her presentation and also sees she’s nervous and provides her with guidance to calm her. AI avatars are digital representations of a human in a virtual setting powered by artificial intelligence. These avatars can take the form of a multitude of personas that are capable of authentic, human-like communication and designed to educate, guide and entertain us.

AR Smart Glasses

Ben and Clara take their avatars on the go with technologically sophisticated glasses that look like the eyewear many of us wear today. The difference? AR smart glasses will bridge our real-world experiences with our digital lives. Instead of head-mounted displays (HMDs), the sleek smart glasses of the future will allow us to interact with digital objects and information overlays directly within our field of vision.

Quantum Computing

Clara is with her team watching the developing hurricane. Quantum computing is powering the highly detailed storm analytics. In Clara’s case, this technology reroutes the ships, potentially saving lives and the business. With quantum, computers can simulate complex scenarios and optimize advantageous outcomes faster than classical computers.

What’s Next?

Each of these innovations is already in development, paving the way for our next-generation experiences. CableLabs is at the forefront of what’s new and next, innovating today for the broadband of tomorrow.

Technology impacts us in every way, touching our lives, businesses and communities. Over the last few years, we’ve experienced a major transformation in how we work and collaborate, which has introduced many benefits and challenges. But with adversity comes opportunity and innovation.

Some of the problems this year’s technology predictions aim to solve are an increased need for remote collaboration, flexible and efficient transportation, personalized technology and secure networks. The possibilities lying ahead are nearly limitless, and our annual tech predictions envision the development of technologies that will define our future.

Remote Work Becomes Serendipitous

We’ve increasingly become a culture that values the flexibility to work from anywhere. For many of us, that means working remotely or at least working in a hybrid environment. New technologies are enabling us to connect in serendipitous ways, leading to meaningful, chance encounters at the right place and time—like when we bump into a colleague in the hallway and the interaction sparks a new idea.

Now, cutting-edge technologies like virtual reality, holograms and smart glasses will transport us into augmented or virtual reality environments that feel real. These new technologies offer us flexibility and opportunities to connect in new ways, making remote work more collaborative. Other benefits include faster training and onboarding, and the need for less physical office space. These augmented and virtual reality innovations may even lead to increased happiness at work.

Autonomous Vehicles Revolutionize Transportation

Buckle up. We’re on the brink of a transportation revolution.

Autonomous vehicles are about to change the way we get around. Today, we understand that autonomous vehicles drive themselves without any intervention by humans other than them defining the destination. The trend toward safer, sustainable and possibly more equitable transportation systems is evolving.

Autonomous vehicles will contribute to lives saved, reduced traffic congestion and less pollution. An economic impact will be felt, too, with autonomous vehicles popular among those who don’t have a driver’s license or who live in areas with poor public transportation options.

It’s not a matter of if this new technology will be integrated into our transportation system—it’s a matter of how and when.

AI Becomes Personal

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and getting smarter every day. As a result, we can expect to see growth in AI as a personal aid in creativity and in health and wellness.

AI has evolved to be easily accessible in a variety of ways, especially because many tools are now open-source. Your favorite apps may even be powered by some form of AI-augmented tools to assist art and music creators. With this increased accessibility, AI has transformed health care for drug development, robotic surgery and telemedicine. As more data is collected and moved to the cloud, we’ll see more personalized services, including smart nurse bots, online health coaches and remote care assistance.

This increased accessibility to health care will be especially beneficial in rural areas and developing countries, and more self-service options will allow people to take better control of their health.

Quantum Networks Become Tangible

Quantum networks are the next step in secure communications. Bolstered by the promise of near-zero latency, elimination of physical network infrastructure and unhackable communications, quantum networks will make it possible to detect with certainty when communications have been intercepted. The networks use quantum phenomena such as superposition, no-cloning and entanglement that are not available in today’s broadband and wireless networks.

Research and investment in quantum networks are already accelerating as companies and governments around the world set up research labs to build large-scale quantum networks. This growth is paving the way for practical applications of the technology to transmit sensitive data and communications.

Defining Our Future

Whether transforming the future of work, enhancing transportation systems, augmenting our creativity or improving communications, technological advancements are addressing some of the most pressing issues of our time. I believe we’ll see some fantastic projects and products launched in 2023. Watch my video below to learn more about these technology predictions.

Imagine if you could create a life-like hologram of a given subject—and then be able to study and experience every detail of that subject later without being physically near it. Sounds like science fiction, right? We’re living in an era when such futuristic technology is already available to us! To make this kind of experience a reality, we can capture the rays of light that bounce off a particular subject, and what makes this possible is “light field media.”

CableLabs’ Immersive Media Experiences team has been researching the ways that light fields can transform the ways we live, learn, work and play. Today, there are already many ways to capture light fields, ranging from the latest smartphone cameras to professional light stage studios that capture the tiniest of details. To view a light field, the latest holographic displays provide high-resolution 3D video without the necessity of headwear or face tracking. Experiencing this technology in person feels like magic!

OTOY’s LightStage

How 10G Will Deliver an Immersive Future

10G will bring unprecedented speed, reliability and security to the world, which is why it’s essential for enabling light field media. Light fields require tremendous amounts of data—more than any other technology that currently exists. Traditional photographs and videos store only a grid of pixels, whereas light fields track exponentially more light rays of colors and directions. Although the ecosystem continues to evolve and reach more people, the cable industry is also preparing to deliver these immersive experiences over the network.

As part of our strategy to support the emergence of immersive media, CableLabs is a contributing member of the Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA), a collaboration between diverse experts across immersive media technologies. IDEA is producing royalty-free specifications that enable standardized end-to-end conveyance of immersive media. These standards will make it possible to create, distribute and enjoy immersive content as the landscape grows richer over time.

From CableLabs’ Near Future series

Watch our 10G and immersive media experiences video, in which the Immersive Media Experiences team demonstrates how light fields work and showcases the latest commercially available light field displays.

It’s 2022, and it’s time for our annual tech innovation predictions. This year is going to be the year of Transforming Human Interactions. The latest innovations highlighted in our video will have an enormous impact on the industry and consumers and require robust broadband networks:

Escalation of AI and Natural Language Systems

“For artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values."- Tim Cook

Technologies like virtual assistants and voice command cars are key innovations we experience throughout each day. Based on artificial intelligence using very large data sets, they function through command and control. While many believe these innovations have reached their peak, recently there’s been announcements of technologies that will make them 25 times better. This reminds us that there’s always room for radical, differentiated types of improvements for our everyday life.

Robots as Companions

“Robots can be our partners.” -Kate Darling

One example of the application for AI and natural language processing is robots. Humans are social animals. The COVID pandemic and the increase in social isolation has prompted the need to explore alternative technologies that could provide digital companionship. Imagine a world where robots can provide human-to-human communication, playing a board game or updating your health information. This ability to have natural interaction with a robotic companion will transform the quality of life for multiple generations.

Combining Blockchain with the Metaverse

“The defining quality of the Metaverse is presence, which is the feeling that you’re really there with another person or in another space.” - Mark Zuckerberg

In this shared digital world, science fiction will become reality and everything in our world will be personalized just for us. Walk down the street and see every street sign tailored to you, go shopping, attend a concert or create a new pet. This next stage of the way we use the internet, connectivity, and computing will open endless possibilities around how we interact as a society and live, work, learn and play.

Tackling Privacy and Security Together

“In a country built on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than privacy.” - Aaron Sorkin

We can’t go through a single day without hearing about a hacker targeting everyone from large enterprises to government networks to individual people. Recently, governments have begun partnering to tackle this issue. By coming together to innovate solutions to block ransomware attacks, we can keep our data and our livelihood safe.

Watch the video below to learn more.

Want to be a part of these predictions? Join the 10G Challenge.

The 10G Challenge is powered by CableLabs in collaboration with industry experts to inspire innovators to leverage the emerging 10G network. The Challenge is designed to support the development of technologies, services and applications that rely on the network of the future. The 10G network is bringing higher internet speeds, more security, lower latency and improved reliability. 10G is a new, powerful broadband network that serves as a platform for innovators to develop new solutions that impact the way we live, work, learn and play.

The future will be driven by the technologies we invent today.

Would you believe that nearly 90 percent of all power outages happen in the last mile of the power grid? Worse yet, with no visibility into the status of power availability or the quality of the distribution portion of the electrical power grid, utility companies often aren’t alerted to an outage until customers call, send a text or post about their experience on social media platforms.

Enter Gridmetrics, Inc.

Originally incubated at CableLabs, Gridmetrics leverages the cable industry’s access-network monitoring capabilities and expertise to measure, monitor and track the availability and stability of voltage in the last mile of the U.S. power distribution grid.

The idea behind Gridmetrics was inspired by Dr. Robert Cruickshank, a DOCSIS pioneer and currently a researcher in power grid modernization. He recognized that the energy sector needs to rethink the way electron flow is managed, which requires new insights and instrumentation—particularly at the grid edge, where generation from renewables is increasingly changing the dynamics of the power demand/response paradigm. More specifically, Gridmetrics evolved from a conversation in 2017 between Dr. Cruickshank, who at the time was a visiting researcher from National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL), and Scott Caruso, who leads strategic ventures at CableLabs.

Gridmetrics is rooted in the belief that the broadband industry is uniquely positioned to provide insights that enable utilities to shape the flow of electrons, much like the early days of DOCSIS and data traffic shaping algorithms. The central idea behind Gridmetrics is to combine existing power sensor data extracted from fiber-node power supplies—delivered on private, high-speed secure communications networks—with analytics and AI to create an out-of-band network of grid sensors. Gridmetrics is positioned to deliver critical new insights and instrumentation to utilities operating the last miles of the power grid.

The two vast, global networks—the power distribution grid and the broadband access network—literally share the last mile (or the first mile, depending on your perspective). In the United States, the broadband network is composed of hundreds of providers, but the last miles of the power grid are operated by thousands of distribution entities, private and public. As a result, in the United States, there is no uniform operation, or even a view of the distribution power grid. Gridmetrics’ premise is based on providing the most comprehensive, independent, observational view of the distribution power grid. Gridmetrics aggregates the inverter status and input voltage every five minutes from hundreds of thousands of existing fiber-node power supplies. These “sensors” have the added advantage of being power resilient with battery backup, thus providing an unprecedented view of the power distribution grid, even when the power grid itself is down.

Gridmetrics’ first application of this new data set centered on a collaborative R&D project with NREL called Situational Awareness of Grid Anomalies (SAGA). The goal of the multi-year, multi-million-dollar project is to create a visualization tool that trains computers to classify grid events in near real time, in the context of potential grid cybersecurity threats.

Anthony Florita, Principal Engineer at NREL and SAGA Principle Investigator, stated: “Gridmetrics supplies a unique data set that is becoming increasingly important as an out-of-band view of the power distribution grid. We have been working with Gridmetrics to utilize this data for grid cybersecurity applications such as SAGA. In addition, we continue to explore opportunities utilizing Gridmetrics as an aide in the modernization of our power distribution grid.”

The Power Event Notification System (PENS) is Gridmetrics’ first commercial product offering, and it essentially creates a state diagram of the distribution grid every five minutes. PENS identifies events (primarily power outages) by looking at state changes in the sensor network across time and space (proximity). PENS has many applications—including insurance, fintech, real estate, corporate security, business resilience and smart cities—but the most urgent and important use of PENS is its application in the public safety, emergency response and situational awareness markets. This is because PENS offers near real-time, hyper-local power insights, often during our fellow citizens’ time of greatest need. PENS empowers public safety and emergency response to shift from reactive to proactive by helping to direct resources to power-vulnerable populations and facilities. PENS is essentially creating a power outage solution.

Gridmetrics wouldn’t have been possible without the support of CableLabs and its membership. And we’re just getting started! Although PENS opens a whole new chapter for Gridmetrics, one of the key learnings over the past few years is the uniqueness of the platform that houses our sensors. In aggregate, Gridmetrics represents the greatest density and distribution available to host commercial-grade Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that require very low latency, secure backhaul and power resilience. Today, participation in Gridmetrics is a no/low-lift for broadband operators. It’s simply a piece of software that polls and aggregates data from the existing equipment in the access network. Then, imagine the possibilities of Gridmetrics hosting purpose-built sensors that could take full advantage of this unique platform. Stay tuned!

Now that 2021 has arrived, it’s time to share my tech innovation predictions for the year. Watch the video below to find out what you can expect to see this year.

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Now that 2020 has arrived, it’s time to share my tech innovation predictions for the year. Watch the video below to find out what you can expect to see this year.

What are your innovation predictions for 2020? Tell us in the comment section below. Best wishes for a great new year!

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