Planning for tomorrow will be more complex Within the turbulent networking environment, planning for the future has become increasingly more difficult. Most operators are already pushing the envelope in terms of capacity and services in keeping their networks up to date, much less being able to predict what s going to develop. In the past, making changes was easy when the only service delivered was video. Little consideration was given to how subsequent changes would affect delivery of new services. When adding channels, operators had the luxury of preparing the headend for the changes, implementing them during periods of low viewership.
Customers typically didn t notice the interruption.
Capacity was easy to figure out, too. A video signal was generated, split and distributed to where it needed to go. Operators didn t have to worry about how many customers were served because it was just a matter of reamplifying signals. Competition is the driver Today, the window of delivering services is rapidly shrinking while the complexity is magnified. The primary driver is competition.