ANGACOM 2014 in this year was an exciting and well organized convention of international cable operators. The weather was fantastic, which is really worth mentioning. The technology in cable is always progressing and this year DOCSIS 3.1 and proactive technologies took center stage. For those of you not familiar, the ANGACOM Cable Show is Europe’s leading Business Platform for Broadband Operators and Content Providers for over 10 years and is hosted annually in Cologne Germany.
A general theme on the show floor was the continued progression to the CMTS in the node and also the question between DOCSIS 3.1 and Fiber to the curb. Each has its own special challenges and it of course matters in which market you are as well. ANGACOM provides a great opportunity to see the differences and similarities between cable in North America and Europe. The image at right shows the first article of Rhode & Schwarz’s CLDG DOCSIS loa
d generator. It’s like their previous CLG generator I had written on, but this one will generate DOCSIS 3.1 channels up to 192 MHz in span with LDPC encoding. Its not quite ready for prime time, so I will write more on it later. I also wrote an article on Teleste simple but smart ingress / egress reducing product.
Two thumbs up to DHS Tools, equipment distributors located in Germany, who just upgraded their booth this year. They have always been very welcoming to us and in addition to more booth space they have a full service bar and food service as do many booths. Below you will see the team hard at work at the end of the first day of the show…making sandwiches for hungry customers. 
The technical sessions were very informative and worth the time especially the DOCSIS 3.1 I moderated. Special thanks to Carsten Engelke and Karin Siefert who work so hard to pull the event together before and during the show. Also special thanks to Daniel Howard, CTO of the SCTE for coordinating the SCTE International breakfast, where we discussed a number of topics including Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM).
There were a lot of very interesting things on the show floor. One that I’m not sure has a market in the US unless it’s in very tight urban apartments is for an appliance that let’s two users watch the same TV at the same time but each user can watch their own preferred show. Each user does get to where either white or red glasses and you will need to have head phones on too but if you have limited space and therefor limited TV’s this might be a way to have Johnny and Jane happy at the same time. I’m not sure it’s prime time ready. It was possible to see a bit of the other show still and if you have motion sickness you many not enjoy the side effect of getting a bit queasy while watching but the idea is very interesting.
Finally thanks to ZCorum who is a partner company of Nimble This LLC that had a booth at ANGACOM and was the only company demonstrating a commercially available PNM application. Every time I walked by the ZCorum booth they were completely swamped with visitors, so there was a lot of interest in the PNM application in Europe as well. For more pictures from ANGACOM visit our Flickr page.
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