Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

 

COLOGNE, Germany ? The ReDe∫ign Project demonstrates the world’s first public DVB-C2 live transmission at ANGA Cable 2010. The event marks an important milestone with respect to the introduction of the new technology in European broadband cable networks.

The ReDe∫ign Project made major contributions to the development of the DVB-C2 standard and carried out complementary research work focusing on the usability of the technology in broadband cable networks. Under the leadership of Institut fuer Nachrichtentechnik of Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, the project successfully implemented a complete DVB-C2 transmission chain for demonstration at its booth E49 at ANGA Cable.

Immediately preceding the demonstration and the start of ANGA Cable 2010, ReDe∫ign organizes the fifth meeting of its Operators’ Forum congregating 20 representatives of European cable operators who represent almost 50 % of the cable subscribers in the EU. Major findings are discussed during the meeting, giving an insight into the impact of DVB-C2 and other advanced technologies, such as new amplifier technology and post-DOCSIS network design, on future cable network architectures.

DVB-C2 is the latest member of the DVB family of second generation digital broadcast standards. The technology was developed in 2009 by DVB to take advantage of the latest technological developments. It has the potential for succeeding DVB-C which has been deployed successfully on world-wide scale. The development of DVB-C2 was primarily driven by the requirement to increase network capacity particularly for new digital video services such as HDTV, 3DTV, and VoD. By introducing novel techniques in the standard, DVB-C2 has the potential for revolutionizing the broadband cable downstream transmission.

As many leading European cable operators repeatedly underlined their interest in the new standard in a circular letter, a rapid DVB-C2 deployment in Europe is foreseen.

Lorenz Glatz, CTO of Kabel Deutschland, said: “We have been continuously supporting the development of the DVB-C2 standard and are very pleased to see the technology being tested successfully. We are in the process of organizing a DVB-C2 field test in anticipation of a rapid commercialization of DVB-C2 equipment.”

Manuel Sequeira, CTO of Zon Multimedia added: “We are very enthusiastic about this milestone being reached. We anticipate that DVB-C2 will be an important add-on to the arsenal of the technologies and tools providing additional capacity and flexibility at our cable plant. This will allow us to offer more advanced digital services to our customers.”