For cable operators looking to reduce the power consumption of their networks and their operational expense, reducing the number of active components on their network and reducing their subscribers per node can offer significant environmental benefits and cost savings, says Aurora Networks.

“The cable industry has various thoughts on how to implement a successful green strategy, but many would agree that the two most important elements of success come with reducing our environmental impact while at the same time reducing costs to the operator,” said John Dahlquist, vice president of marketing for Aurora Networks. “As Aurora Networks continues to work with many operators around the globe to implement green solutions, we see an opportunity to share our field knowledge so that the entire industry can benefit.”

According to Aurora, one of the major power consumers on HFC networks is the RF actives that allow the network to service subscribers. By pushing fibre deeper into the network (closer to the customer), operators can dramatically reduced their power consumer.

“Cable network architectures that eliminate the need for RF amplifiers in the coaxial plant by pushing fiber deeper realize more than a 70 percent reduction in the number of active devices in the distribution portion of the network,” Aurora said. “This results in more than a 50-percent drop in power consumption and a significant reduction in maintenance requirements, including truck rolls. Fiber is hundreds of times lower in signal attenuation than coax; thus replacing coax with fiber enables a significantly more efficient network to be built.”

Getting the fibre closer to the customer also means that each node will now be able to support less subscribers, which increases performance per subscriber while offering more environmental benefits because it reduces installation and maintenance costs and reduces vehicle emissions because of the few active components to support each subscriber.

“Traditional HFC architectures typically serve from 500 to 2,000 homes. Operators can reduce the number of homes served per node for greater network granularity. This not only increases bandwidth per subscriber, but also reduces the number of actives in a network, dramatically increasing network reliability and associated service availability. Ultimately, this results in fewer potential failure points between the headend and the customer; and an outage will affect fewer subscribers.”

By adopting this strategy, which Aurora has dubbed its Fiber Deep architecture, operators get a green network upgrade that can achieve significant cost savings.

“For example, power for a typical 70,000-home serving area, with an average of approximately 85 homes per node, costs only $75,000 a year with Fiber Deep, compared to approximately $310,000 for a similar-sized HFC network serving 500 homes per node,” the company said.

According to Aurora, cable operators can achieve the following benefits:

* Annual energy cost savings of more than 75 percent for this serving area
* More than 70 percent reduction in plant actives
* More than 65 percent reduction in maintenance and operations costs