Cable Europe Labs urges operators to get mobile

Cable operators need to articulate their mobile strategies to meet their customers’ aspirations while persuading premium content owners to make their assets available outside the home in return for assurances over security. This vision was spelt out by Thomas Nogues, Cable Europe Labs Director of Technology Advocacy at TV Connect in London last week. Nogues agreed with Virgin Media’s Chief Operating Officer Andrew Baron that after 20 years establishing ownership of the home, cable operators must refocus efforts for the next five years on winning the battle of the mobile space outside.

But operators should not attempt to conquer the mobile arena in one go and should adopt a four stage approach, building out from Wi-Fi within the home, partly in order to carry the major rights holders with them, Nogues contended. It was no use having universal coverage if all the premium content people wanted to watch was still locked up inside the home.

Stage one, where many cable operators are today, involves widespread deployment of Wi-Fi for multi-room distribution within the home to secondary TVs as well as laptops, tablets and smartphones, backed up by a wired option such as coax via the MoCA (Multimedia Over Coax Alliance) or power cable via HomePlug AV. Liberty Global has taken this line with its Horizon hybrid platform, advocating Wi-Fi as its preferred in-home medium but specifying MoCA as the wired backup or backbone option.

The second stage of mobile migration, which some cable operators are now entering, involves creation of HomeSpots comprising multiple Wi-Fi connected homes in a given locality. “We want to leverage the idea that we can connect a number of homes with cable and be able to create a community, so that one subscriber can move to someone else’s home and access the Internet seamlessly there,” said Nogues.

This resembles the model promoted by Fon Wireless, which has created a global Wi-Fi network with over 7 million participating Hotspots. Fon subscribers or members, known as “Foneros”, share part of their Wi-Fi bandwidth with other members in return for free access to the rest of the Fon network.

But Nogues suggested this would not appeal to cable operators without more ability to control and monitor access to a subscriber’s Wi-Fi network by the visiting friends or guest subscribers. “With Fon there is no way to balance traffic between the visiting person and yourself,” said Nogues.

In any case, this second stage is not enough to provide anywhere near universal coverage on its own, even if it can make an important contribution. That is why some operators are now in the third phase of mobility, creating Hotspot networks beyond the home in various ways. “Lots of cable operators have thought about this and Telenet in Belgium has been doing this for many years,” said Nogues. “When they provide Wi-Fi for a business, they can add an access point outside for other subscribers.”

Nogues also highlighted Virgin Media’s deployment of Wi-Fi in the London Underground network as a successful example of third stage mobility. Another example is Kabel Deutschland in Germany, which has equipped 120,000 of its street cabinets with Wi-Fi equipment for Internet access.

The fourth and final phase is then to recruit 4G/LTE to fill in remaining coverage gaps for mobile TV, but this is more of a long-term project in most cases, with strategies dependent on many factors such as geography and the operator’s financial resources.

“MSOs are not big enough to bid for spectrum usually, so they are more likely to become MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators),” said Nogues. MVNOs do not own spectrum themselves but obtain it from a licensed spectrum holder on a wholesale basis. This had been encouraged by some countries in their auctions for 4G spectrum in order to enhance overall competition, such as the UK where Three, owned by Hutchison, will sell spectrum to other smaller service providers that could not compete with the big three comprising Vodafone, EE and Telefonica.

Apart from having to wait for 4G/LTE roll out, this fourth stage will be held up by the time taken for LTE to become fully capable of delivering HD video. “At the moment even Wi-Fi is only at the very beginning and with LTE we are not quite there yet,” said Nogues.

The other issue is legal rights. Nogues anticipates that a softly-softly approach by operators who are building out from home Wi-Fi is more likely to carry the major content owners with them. “Today most multiscreen services are limited to the home,” says Nogues. “This could be extended first to HomeSpots, then Hotspots, then finally LTE.”