Drive Down Cable Network Complexity and Operating Costs

Double Digit Spend with Single-Digit Growth

Across North America, cable operators face the same challenge of driving down network complexity and operating costs. The math is simple, how can they continue to spend in the double digits to support bandwidth demands, while only recouping single digit revenue growth?

Too Many Networks

The problem areas are obvious; most cable providers effectively maintain separate overlay networks to deliver the multiple services that consumers and businesses demand – linear video, video-on-demand (VoD), IP traffic, and more. The different services require dedicated equipment, management, and operational expertise. With market consolidation over the years, some operators have even more headaches from managing multiple access networks (HFC, DSL, PON, wireless) at the same time.

Sky High Operations Costs

Multiple networks are also expensive to operate. They require massive operational overhead with time-consuming, manual processes serving as the standard. And with growing bandwidth demands, equipment is continually added to hub sites, so the already high operational expenses for power, cooling, and maintenance costs just continue to grow.

New Opportunities Are Few and Far Between

Another problem area is service complexity. With a multitude of services dependent on disparate physical networks, scaling or changing service delivery is very difficult. This means that updating services or rolling out new ones is painfully slow – to reach customers and revenue targets. And, adapting access networks to accommodate new business models (managed Wi-Fi or mobile backhaul) becomes an overwhelming task. And opportunities to generate revenues and compete against OTT or pure fiber players, come to market too late or not at all.

Break the Cycle of Exploding Demand and Shrinking Revenue

How can cable operators compete and grow? They need to change the economics of their business and break the cycle of exploding demand and shrinking revenues. This means designing new, differentiated products and bringing them to market faster. To do this, they need a single network that can support every kind of service and do it more efficiently. All this require abstracting away the complexity of multiple networks, automating manual processes, and reducing power, space, and cooling requirements – by running all services with fewer resources.

The Cable Network of the Future: Core Capabilities Checklist

If you’re thinking about how to break the cycle of exploding demand and shrinking revenue, what’s the best path to success? What should the platform(s) your considering enable you to do moving forward? We’ve put together a quick five-point checklist of what your future network should look like:

1. Speed to design, deliver, and update services more quickly to compete with OTT video services and emerging cloud competitors. This requires simplifying access networks radically and consolidating them into a single, standards-based framework so that any service can be delivered over a single infrastructure.
2. Simplified implementations and operations to drive down costs and complexity. Network resources need to be virtualized so that they can be managed like any other cloud service — scaled up and down elastically and positioned wherever they’re required at any time.
3. Automation to roll out new services in days instead of months, and make it easy to continually refine and enhance services. Using network abstraction, higher-level services need to be decoupled from complex underlying infrastructures, turning physical and virtual devices into programmable network elements.
4. Flexibility to deploy and move workloads wherever they are most efficient, anywhere across the network, and scale resources elastically with demand. By using a management framework that can proactively monitor network health, cable operators will be able to provision new services and devices automatically, in seconds.
5. Agility to support new business models wherever and whenever opportunities arise. This requires cloud-scale flexibility and economics, enabling cable operators to deliver any service, anywhere, quickly and automatically.

Find Out More

To find out how Cisco’s cable access solutions can help you to break the cycle of exploding demand and shrinking revenue, download a copy of our new E-Book, The Road to Cisco Infinite Broadband. And stay tuned to the Cisco newsroom for some upcoming product news.

Visit Us at ANGA COM

We’ll be in Cologne Germany for ANGA COM at the end of May. We invite you to stop by the booth and see our latest products in action. To find out more about our speaking sessions and booth demos, visit https://ciscoangacom.eventtouch.eu/home.