October 9, 2006

Cox Leverages Optics in Kansas

By Jonathan Tombes

Amidst analyst reports that trumpet looming bandwidth crises, back on the front line operators seem to be coping well enough with existing tools. Take the Cox Communications Kansas/Arkansas system. Here’s an example of optical transport technology targeted to optimize existing constraints, today.

As with other cable systems, capacity requirements in Cox Kansas/Arkansas have grown, albeit at rates consistent with Cox’s own deployment cycles. Ahead of other operators on voice and business services, Cox is only now launching VOD in this system, for instance. Yet the new service has made its presence well-known on the network.

“With current demands, video on demand is probably our highest consumer of bandwidth,” says Cox Kansas/Arkansas Director of Engineering Rod McGinn. “However, with the growth on the high-speed Internet data side and with the commercial business side, they rank close seconds.”

Cox system has transported these and other services in this region using Cisco Systems’ OSN 15454 multi-service provisioning platform. The OC-48 optical network itself involves three geographic rings: a 1,600 km east Kansas ring; a 900 km west Kansas ring; and a 600 km northwest Arkansas ring.

Express lanes

The Wichita-based system now is also using optical equipment from OpVista to establish what McGinn calls “express lanes” to deliver these services to specific cities. “We still use the Cisco equipment,” he says. “We’re just using it in a little bit different fashion.”

“One of the advantages that OpVista provides is the fact that it has essentially a 1,000 km reach,” McGinn says. “It minimizes the number of times that we need to regenerate that signal.”

The first implemention of OpVista addressed a concentration of traffic between Topeka and Wichita, and Kansas City and Wichita. “Instead of having to provision in all 18 locations around the (Cisco) ring, this allowed us to provision at two points,” says McGinn.

The upshot was a migration of traffic off the Cisco rings, resulting in “better efficiencies” both in terms of provisioning of services over the new express routes and also making greater bandwidth available over the existing multi-service aggregation platform.

The extensive reach and point-to-point functionality of OpVista’s technology dovetailed with two of Cox’s growing bandwidth demands. “In this case, the two express routes were predominantly being driven by commercial services,” McGinn says. “But we’ve applied this same aspect to supporting VOD.”

- Jonathan Tombes