Greg Calton – Director of Marketing, Amphenol Broadband Solutions (abs-go.com)
One of the challenges every broadband service provider encounters is that of “squeezing” more capacity from their current facilities. This article describes how a vendor can help a service provider address such a challenge.
Often, an important consideration when increasing the capacity of a network is how well any new equipment will mesh with existing infrastructure. This is not only true of the coax and other components, but also of any of the supportive structure that must interact with them such as housings, closures, racks etc. The most successful deployments are often those that effectively “bridge the gap” between old and new technologies.
As increasing bandwidth demand continues to drive network growth, it is imperative that service providers are able to exploit their deployed assets. Necessary for this is the assurance that new passives and other peripherals can readily fit into the current network. Backward compatibility allows newer technologies to advance without superseding current network elements. Properly designed products take into consideration factors such as existing hardware, industry standards, network company operations, space availability and much more. These challenges can be intimidating and sometimes the only answer would seem to be replacement of existing equipment with a whole new “system” of equipment, housings and other peripherals. To help justify this approach economically, such a solution is often suggested by its vendor to be “future-ready.” Instead, it might make sense that the provider look to an approach that is backward compatible with their current hardware and network architecture.
A prudent approach may be to use products designed to successfully move a network provider and its end-users into the future, while taking advantage of already-deployed assets. New devices, smartly designed to work within these already defined network boundaries provide the simplest and lowest cost approach to providing new service revenues.
This is the philosophy used by Amphenol Broadband Solutions when designing passive and active components as well as how they integrate into existing and new networks.
To review, vendors can best serve the needs of broadband service providers by offering solutions that:
- Exploit the current network infrastructure model
- Create greater customer satisfaction
- Accelerate the revenue model
- Minimize construction and deployment costs
Essentially, careful design of new components to fit into current infrastructure elements increases the scalability of the network. Contrast this with the costs of beginning the transformation to a network design that requires all new components, new closures, new housings, etc. Such a comparison should make it readily clear that network components specifically designed to fit into current ecosystems are the intelligent decision.