A path to digital cable.

Early adoption of fiber optic cabling leaves Rogers Cablesystems well positioned for a two-way digital future.

James Careless

Fiber optic cabling is as common to cable TV networks as set-top boxes and coaxial cable. But this wasn't always the case in fact, in the late 1980s, the idea of using fiber for any kind of cable connectivity was virtually unheard of - except at Rogers Cablesystems.

Based in Toronto, Rogers serves more than 2 million subscribers in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alaska. The company has a reputation for innovation: its founder, Ted Rogers Sr., invented the vacuum tube that allowed radios to run on household AC current, making the technology accessible to the average home user. In a sense, Rogers made the mass marketing of radio - and the TV revolution that followed it - possible. The company was also a pioneer in FM broadcasting in Canada.

So when it came to considering fiber optic cabling as a transport medium for cable TV, it's not surprising that Rogers was there first. With cable systems scattered around regions such as southern Ontario, it made sense to tie them into an integrated network.

'Rogers recognized quite a long time ago that there was something unique about our cable system, in that we have fairly densely clustered populations of customers,' says Dermot O'Carroll, Rogers' vice president of engineering and operations. 'If we could interconnect those effectively, then we could lay the foundation for being able to deliver services very economically.'

Rogers chose to install fiber for immediately practical reasons. The first was networking: Rogers decided fiber would be perfect for interconnecting in places such as Toronto, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, and London (the birthplace of Canadian cable TV).

Given the nature of Canadian cable TV, this made good business sense. The entire industry has been driven by Canadians' desire for U.S. channels, which cable TV companies could only initially receive off-air. By tying all of its systems together using fiber, Rogers was able to feed quality U.S. signals to cities farther from the border. It also ended the engineering costs and headaches associated with maintaining full headends at each site.

The inter-city fiber optic network also provided the basis for two-way network management. Thanks to fiber, Rogers was able to install monitoring equipment throughout the company's territory, detecting problems before subscribers did.

Rogers' reliance on fiber optics rather than satellite distribution has paid off in unexpected ways. For instance, when the failure of a Canadian Anik-E satellite temporarily wiped out domestic TV signal distribution a few years ago, Rogers was able to keep its systems alive while others failed.

Today, with digital services rolling out, this approach has put the company in a unique position, says O'Carroll. When Rogers does launch digital cable in Ontario, it will be able to feed all of its systems from a single headend in Toronto.

By bringing fiber into the network, Rogers can reduce the number of analog coax amplifiers between the headend and subscribers, making for better pictures and happier subscribers. Driving this rebuild is Nick Hamilton-Piercy, Rogers' senior vice president of engineering and technology. Hamilton-Piercy was a fiber optic believer long before it became fashionable; in fact, his work helped make it so. In the 1980s, 'Nick and other pioneers in the industry recognized that if you could shorten the cascades of analog amplifiers, you could significantly and dramatically improve quality,' says O'Carroll.

To achieve this, he used fiber optic cabling to trunk headend signals into the network (fed using pulse code modulation), thereby shortening the number of trunk amplifiers in cascade. Key to this fiber optic architecture was the 'ring.' Rather than just running fiber out to subscribers in a standard tree-and-branch layout, the company encircled each of its territories with a primary ring. This was, in turn, connected to the secondary tree-and-branch coax networks that fed its subscribers directly.

The beauty of the ring is in its redundancy. If something happens to interrupt the signal path in one direction, service can be immediately restored by sending it in the other. To the engineer, the result is breathing space: customers remain served, while field technicians are given time to make repairs properly, rather than under pressure. Today, such redundancy is taken for granted in most cable systems. But in the early 1990s, such reliability was almost unheard of, particularly in Canada.

The success of primary ring architecture persuaded Rogers to do two things:

1) Improve service by adding secondary rings to the primaries in major cities, to bring fiber closer to the home.

2) Start rebuilding all its systems to handle two-way traffic. The overall success of fiber as a transport medium - and the realization that, in the future, cable TV might do more than just provide one-way video - convinced Rogers that this was the fight direction to move.

Delays in the arrival of digital TV - and the doubling of the estimated set-top box cost from C$300 to C$600 apiece - means that it will be some time before Rogers' two-way plant pays for itself. Still, the company's early commitment to fiber optics allowed it to roll out high-speed Internet service, the Wave@Home, to about half of the 2.5 million homes it passes by the end of 1997. 'By the end of this year, we will have 2.1 to 2.2 million of them completely two-way, with fiber all the way down to all of the secondary hubs,' says O'Carroll. 'By the end of next year, we'll have all of our fiber deployed.'

With pressure coming from the telephone companies, wireless cable, and Direct-to-Home satellite, Rogers' survival may well hinge on the fact that it jumped on the fiber optics bandwagon long before the rest of the industry even noticed it was rolling.

Careless is a freelance writer based in Ottawa, Ontario.