Pinpoint communications equipment upgrade#
Pinpoint communications equipment software#

“The insight was that if you go back and look at the trailing edge of the technology, you see we have three generations faster and more finer-resolution optical spectrum analyzers.

Pinpoint communications equipment software#

By installing these optical spectrum analyzers in the local fiber networks and developing software to leverage the devices’ capabilities in new ways, the team was able to gain unprecedented visibility into performance along every millimeter of those networks. Mutalik’s team got together and built a prototype for a system called the XMF. Pinpointing problemsĪbove: Comcast’s network makes gigabit internet available to as many as 59 million homes. Mutalik reasoned that optical components such as optical spectrum analyzers, which are designed to perform pinpoint measurements over thousands of miles, would be that much more effective in managing an optical network that powers a single neighborhood. He added, “‘Do we know what wavelengths on those fibers are? How many wavelengths are going down? How many wavelengths are coming up? And if there was an outage of any kind, how do we know the outage is a fiber card versus somebody hitting a telephone pole and then taking the node out?'”Ĭomcast’s local fiber optic networks in cities, towns, and neighborhoods cover shorter distances than the long-haul networks connecting cities. The question was ‘Do we know what all those fibers are doing?'” There are a quarter of a million nodes that we have connected to the headends, and all of them are short distances. “And so we have a huge amount of fiber assets that go coast to coast. “We’re going to have our fiber assets increase 10 times, or something like that, exponentially increasing over time because everything that we need to do is going to be connected by fiber,” Mutalik said. What would happen if Comcast repurposed these mature optoelectronic chips to monitor traffic traveling thousands of feet? He knew previous-generation optical spectrum analyzers and other such components were powerful devices designed to manage fiber optic traffic over thousands of miles. This gives the company insight into the data traffic on its networks but not the actual data we’re sending to each other in messages and such, Nafshi said. On top of that, they can use the same tests to figure out whether the fiber lines are fraying or otherwise losing their capacity to transmit data. The light bounces back more quickly if there is a break in the line, and they use the difference in timing to calculate the precise distance to the break and exactly where it is. The engineers can measure how long it takes to do this if the network is normal.

Comcast can now easily send light signals out through the fiber-optic network, and the light beams hit their destination and bounce back.

Mutalik figured out a way to repurpose previous-generation technology to monitor internet traffic. Mutalik is an engineer on the Next Generation Access team, and Comcast has taken his idea and implemented it across the company’s network as a way to keep things running smoothly. We see our network as the smartest, fastest, and most reliable. And we’re continuously evolving our network. “COVID really highlighted the significance of connectivity. “We have a relentless focus on connectivity, as it has never been more important,” Elad Nafshi, senior VP of the Next Generation Access team, said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Pinpoint communications equipment upgrade#

Comcast plans to eventually upgrade to 10G, which will allow it to deliver 10 gigabits a second both upstream and downstream to the 20-plus million subscriber homes on its network. Fixing cables quickly is going to become even more important as the networks carry 10 times more data in the coming years. The ability to restore service is particularly important during the pandemic, when broadband connectivity has been critical for just about everybody.