You’ve undoubtedly heard of “triple play” — the digital phone, TV and Internet package that telecom, cable and satellite companies have been pushing to consumers for the past decade. By offering an affordable bundle to consumers, the adoption rate of broadband has been growing around the world — one third of all households now have Internet.
As a result of that growth, two things happened: customers started expecting richer connectivity experiences and competitors started to differentiate their services. For a company like Broadcom, the effect has been a demand for innovative new technologies that will allow service providers to continuously up their game.
“The bandwidth war keeps service providers looking for new innovation in terms of what they can offer, and that really drives us to continue to develop new products,” said Gregory Fischer, VP & GM of Broadcom’s Broadband Carrier Access group. “It also creates turnover in their networks.”
Carriers turn to us to make their offerings faster, more reliable and different from their competition. Broadcom enables companies such as AT&T in North America or Belgacom in Europe to improve their services on both sides of the curb – in the back-end infrastructure that powers the technology, as well as the in-home experience. From adding 5G WiFi to residential gateways, to deploying new advances in Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) for improved customer service, Broadcom’s technology is powering new ways to “triple play,” such as sharing content on multiple devices and home automation.
This week, at Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, the industry’s biggest tradeshow, Broadcom is showing innovations in DSL, passive optical networking (PON) and Powerline communications.
Broadcom’s helping telecom carriers improve the connection between their infrastructure and their customers’ homes by upgrading the existing DSL infrastructure through a technique called vectoring and bonding of phone lines. Vectoring cancels out what’s called “crosstalk” from other phone lines and increases the signal-to-noise-ratio, according to Broadcom’s Fischer, and bonding adds capacity.
“You get something like 4x the throughput,” he said. “It’s a very competitive data rate with fiber.”
Broadcom’s BCM63168 VDSL platform, which is being adopted by China’s ZTE Corp., allows telecoms to leverage their existing copper infrastructure without laying new fiber.
Broadcom’s also powering Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) a super-speedy fiber architecture that’s lighting up Internet connections in places that have never been connected, such as China. Broadcom has integrated the expertise, both hardware and software, along with technology gained from the acquisitions of BroadLight and Teknovus to develop the technologies that meet the tough requirements for residential triple play services, including video-on-demand (VoD), high definition Internet Protocol Television (HD-IPTV), voice over IP (VoIP) and high-speed Internet. A huge milestone is the ability to deploy a common software platform across all carrier access platforms — DSL, PON and Powerline — dramatically reducing the time-to-market to build and deploy devices.
Broadcom counts itself among the world’s top suppliers of Passive Optical Network chips. “We have the people internally who understand the technology, who wrote the standards, and who are the world’s experts,” Fischer said. “We also have the scale within the business to invest.”
Inside the home, Broadcom is touting networking via Powerline, a system that uses existing electrical outlets to boost Internet signals, especially in areas where Wi-Fi breaks down, such as heavily populated urban settings. D-Link Systems Inc., which makes routers and other networking gear, is partnering with Broadcom to use the standards-based BCM60321 HomePlug AV Powerline Communications (PLC) system-on-a-chip (SoC) for its new line of Powerline networking adapters.
As a longstanding supporter of the TR-069 standard, Broadcom achieved new certification on its DSL software platform by the Broadband Forum. The standard enables time- and money-saving features for carriers to better diagnose, monitor, configure and update their networks remotely.
“It’s a way for them to manage the whole home network, from the sidewalk into your home, with remote software upgrades, diagnostics and monitoring,” Broadcom’s Fischer said. “We have supported this platform for a long time now, and we are taking our leadership and extending it into our Powerline platforms.”
Follow us at Broadband World Forum, where our partners are innovating in the carrier access industry. If you’re not heading to Amsterdam, follow the action on Facebook and Twitter with hashtag #BBWF.
Related:
- IPTV Revolution in Your Living Room: Broadcom at IBC Amsterdam
- In Television, the Future is Now
- Hello Sao Paulo: Digital TV Takes Over in Brazil
- Broadcom’s Broadband Carrier Access Solutions
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