3D技术遭冷遇，有线电视产业瞄准智能手机市场

Pico cell links smartphones to cable-TV nets

by Rick Merritt

An informal poll of cable-TV executives voted a pico cell product announced today (Aug. 16) by BelAir Networks the most promising new product shown at the group's twice yearly technical conference. The choice was outside the home networking area that was the dominant theme at the CableLabs Summer Conference where the poll was taken.

The BelAir100SP Strand Picocell is designed to connect cellular or Wi-Fi traffic to a cable hybrid fibre-coax network using Docsis 3.0. Using the product cable-TV operators--some of whom already use larger basestations—could more easily deploy systems to complete voice and data calls for overloaded cellular carrier.

"We are deploying this kind of equipment including BelAir's system for Wi-Fi now so to add licensed spectrum to [our capabilities] is interesting," said Mark Coblitz, senior vice president of strategic planning at Comcast. "We all feel the pain that BelAir is addressing to get coverage at spots and capacity in specific locations, he said.

Market watcher Visant Strategies estimates cable operator share of the mobile wireless backhaul market will grow more than five-fold by 2016 to hit $3 billion in annual service revenues by 2015. Comcast Interactive is an investor in BelAir.

"We think this is very revolutionary in terms of opening up new business models," said David Park, vice president of product marketing at BelAir. "There's been unprecedented growth of access to the Internet via mobile devices in recent years—as much as a 50-fold growth of data for AT&T--and that’s been a huge challenge and pain point," he said.

The new pico cell is designed for outdoor use and has a range of 300-500 meters. It comes in versions supporting CDMA and GSM networks.

"By far the most dominant theme" at the CableLabs event "was technology to connect devices in the home in a myriad of different ways," said David Reed, chief strategy officer of CableLabs, the R&D arm of the cable-TV industry.

Big Band Networks, Panasonic and others showed ways to link cable-TV services to consumer devices supporting Internet Protocol, Reed said. In addition, Active Video and

NetGear demonstrated prototype gateways that could extend cable-TV services to IP devices, he said.

Another big theme was linking cable-TV and Web services. Pace showed an existing set-top box linking to online applications stories. Other companies showed back-end software for supporting online applications stories on cable-TV networks.

A dozen companies were invited to present their wares at the event. None of them were in the area of stereo 3-D, currently one of the hottest emerging areas in consumer electronics for TV makers.

"We did not get a lot of 3-D proposals and in the startup space we felt there were some more attractive areas," said Reed. "The showcase requires demoing the technology which also may have been a factor," he said.