As we look to the future of broadband technology, CableLabs is leading the charge with a bold vision designed to be a catalyst for transformative change. Our mission is to align our members and vendor community to create a collaborative context where we can work together to overcome industry challenges and seize opportunities.
Through events and activities, we invite industry leaders, technologists and product strategists to come together to learn how they can get involved with us as we shape the future of the industry, address industry challenges and create a healthier, more competitive ecosystem.
Inspiring Transformative Change through the CableLabs Technology Vision Framework
Facilitating collaboration to create impact together is a tenet of CableLabs’ Technology Vision. With the underlying goals of delighting customers, providing seamless connectivity and growing into new markets, the Technology Vision creates a roadmap for achieving the goal of ubiquitous, context-aware connectivity and an adaptive, intelligent network.
To achieve this ambitious mission, CableLabs members and the vendor community must work together to create solutions at scale and harness the power of collaboration. By aligning industry goals, combining expertise and sharing resources, we can offset risk and cost, bring together diverse perspectives and accomplish more together to create a seamlessly connected world.
The Technology Vision framework is built on three key pillars:
- Pervasive Intelligence, Security and Privacy — Creating intelligence at every point in the network to ensure high performance, reliability, security and privacy for all users and devices in any connectivity context.
- Seamless Connectivity — Enabling new experiences for customers and new revenue opportunities for operators through connectivity anywhere, from any device, without concern for the access network technology or how the user is moving across the network.
- Network Platform Evolution — Developing innovations that will drive the most reliable, cost-effective, sustainable network architectures for our members, ensuring optionality and unmatched flexibility while delivering seamless connectivity experiences to users.
Driving Alignment Toward a New, Adaptive Era of Broadband Innovation
The evolution of broadband is framed by three distinct eras: the Speed Era, Experience Era and Adaptive Era. These phases reflect the ongoing advancements in network capabilities and user experiences. During the Speed Era, technology innovation focused on metrics-based competition. As we move through the Experience Era and toward the Adaptive Era, the driving force has shifted to differentiation and stickiness (Experience Era) with the ultimate goals of service agility and ubiquity (Adaptive Era).
The Technology Vision framework drives alignment among member operators and the broader vendor community through several strategic initiatives:
- Specifications and standards
- SDO engagement and ecosystem development
- Technology transfer
- Member/Vendor POCs
- SCTE chapters and training
- Events (SCTE TechExpo, Engage, summits)
- Open source
Within these initiatives, core focus areas encourage collaboration on delivering flexible network solutions that are capable of enabling new services and improved user experiences — and ultimately help us build a seamlessly connected world.
Working Groups: Tools for Industry Success
Achieving industry success requires balancing the requirements of both operators and vendors. CableLabs and our subsidiary, SCTE, both actively support working groups that provide mechanisms for doing so by creating timely, cost-effective solutions that benefit operators, vendors and customers. The greatest successes result when industry stakeholders collaboratively develop solutions that address the business needs of cable operators and can be developed at the right time and cost to support those needs.
The CableLabs working groups typically develop specifications for the industry, focusing on the research and engineering of a solution. The SCTE groups focus on how that solution is deployed and operated. Overall, the two are complementary in the value chain, moving from ideation to specification to implementation and operation. This has played out in various ways historically — including DOCSIS, the gap node, smart amplifiers and proactive network maintenance (PNM).
The net result of both approaches is the development of specifications, standards and other outputs that enable new products and services that operators want and vendors can build. In all cases, active engagement from vendors and operators is critical for project success.
Here are examples of how working groups get results:
Common Provisioning & Management of PON
Provisioning and management of Passive Optical Networks (PON) are critical to advancing cable network capabilities, overcoming integration challenges and removing interoperability barriers.
Short-term goals include simplifying PON integration through leveraging existing DOCSIS back office systems, developing the Cable OpenOMCI specification and enhancing interoperability. For the long term, the group is exploring Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based solutions and virtualized PON architectures to support future growth and flexibility. Deliverables include a technical report on DOCSIS provisioning and the Cable OpenOMCI specification.
Optical Operations and Maintenance Working Group
The Optical Operations and Maintenance Working Group (OOM-WG) is focused on architecture assessment, telemetry assessment and translating to field practices. Delivery goals include:
- Unified telemetry
- Specific guidance for major architectures based on similarities and differences
- General network operations approach for FCAPS: identify issue, resolve cause, localize, address with suitable action be that maintenance, capacity management or other action
Ultimately, this group’s objective is to reduce troubleshooting and problem resolution time and costs while increasing network capacity and uptime. This includes integration across the tools stack to reduce the burden of engineering, operations and troubleshooting.
Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) Working Group
The Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) working group focuses on standardizing and expediting new PNM technologies to operations and in the field. The group, a part of SCTE’s Network Operations Subcommittee, works in collaboration with our member and vendor communities to develop standards, operational practices, guidelines and training content to support their initiatives.
Advancing Innovation, Creating Impact in the Broadband Industry
Ready to join CableLabs in advancing industry innovation to create a seamlessly connected world? Explore our working groups, SCTE Standards, Interop·Labs events and SCTE TechExpo events, where we seek to address key industry challenges and opportunities. By fostering collaboration among members and vendors, we are paving the way for a future marked by pervasive intelligence, seamless connectivity and adaptable network solutions.