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A major outage caused by a failing fiber optic switch owned by Level 3 Communications left millions of cable subscribers along the eastern seaboard without Internet access Saturday.

The outage affected Cablevision and Time Warner Cable customers from Albany, N.Y. eastward to Long Island and north into Maine.

Some cable operators did a better job dealing with Level 3’s troubled equipment than others.

A Cablevision spokesperson indicated technicians discovered the problem, routed around it, and restored service about an hour later.

Time Warner Cable apparently waited for Level 3 to repair or replace the switch, leaving their broadband customers offline for most of Saturday morning.

The switch failure did not just affect Internet Service Providers. Some content distribution networks and regional servers for major websites including Facebook and Twitter also had problems.

Although the outage was too brief for Cablevision customers to qualify for a service credit, affected Time Warner Cable customers can use the company’s online chat platform or call to request a one day broadband service credit for the interruption.

AT&T has expanded its TV Everywhere service to cover more devices and networks, adding more than 20 channels available for streaming outside of the home.

AT&T U-verse live TV streaming is available to customers subscribing to a U-family or higher U-verse TV package, and can be viewed on a growing number of devices including iPad/iPhone (iOS) and more than 25 current generation Android smartphone models.

Many, but not all popular cable networks are available for streaming, as are most premium movie channels.

But the biggest change subscribers are looking for is streaming those cable channels outside of the home on the go. Most cable carriage agreements still restrict out-of-home streaming, but providers are negotiating to drop that restriction.

“By making live TV content available across devices we’re enabling our customers to watch TV on their terms when and where they want it,” said Mel Coker, chief marketing officer, AT&T Home Solutions, in a statement. “U-verse has always been about delivering a TV experience built around our customers, and this enhancement gives them even more flexibility and control.”

The networks now available for out-of-the home viewing:

AXS TV, Big Ten Network, CNN, Disney Channel, Disney Jr., Disney XD, Encore, Encore-West, Encore Action, ESPN 1/2/3, ESPN U, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Channel, HDNet Movies, HLN, NFL Network, NFL RedZone, Showtime (All variants), Starz (All variants), The Movie Channel, The Movie Channel West, TMC Xtra, and TMC Xtra-West.

All online viewing from a U-verse broadband connection counts against AT&T’s U-verse monthly usage cap of 250GB, presently unenforced in most areas.

New York regulators have turned down Time Warner Cable’s request to shut off past due phone customers late at night or on weekends to protect consumers.

The Public Service Commission today reaffirmed long-standing rules that allow phone providers to only disconnect customers for non-payment between the hours of 8:00am – 7:30pm Monday through Thursday and 9:00am to 3:00pm on Friday.

“We are saying ‘no’ to Time Warner’s request to waive our rules regarding when it would be authorized for suspensions and terminations of its telephone customers,” said Commission chair Audrey Zibelman. “The Commission’s rules applicable to Time Warner are consistent with the hours of operation of the Commission’s consumer call center which receives consumer complaints’ and requests for assistance. To ensure telephone consumers’ rights are protected, especially core customers such as the elderly and disabled, it is essential customers are afforded the opportunity to contact our call center if their telephone service is threatened with a potential suspension or termination.”

But Time Warner Cable was granted approval of most of its other regulatory reform requests:

• Time Warner Cable can now apply partial payments first to basic local telephone charges, then non-basic services;
• The cable company will not have to distribute White Page directories except on request in print or CD-ROM format;
• After six months of providing monthly service quality figures, the cable company can limit future reports to only reflect standards for “core customers,” if the PSC finds Time Warner is providing adequate service.

An enterprising reader of the Broadband Reports‘ AT&T Forum stumbled on proposed pricing for AT&T’s faster speed services for U-verse and, presumably, their planned fiber-to-the-home rollout in Austin, Tex.:

The prices are no bargain in comparison to the $70 a month Google charges Kansas City residents for 1,000/1,000Mbps service, but on the lower end, AT&T’s 45Mbps U-verse option is comparable to Time Warner Cable’s 50/5Mbps tier, which now sells for $65-75 a month on a one-year promotion:

Time Warner Cable’s latest broadband offers

Just a few years after cable systems began upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 to improve broadband speeds and performance through channel bonding, CableLabs is set to formalize next-generation DOCSIS 3.1 by the end of this month, allowing cable broadband speeds to reach well into the gigabits.

“We made a fairly bold assertion in October of last year that we would have them substantially complete and publicly issued by the end of 2013,” Matt Schmitt, director of DOCSIS at CableLabs said this morning. “This is quite a bit faster than we have ever pulled off before. It’s not a small project to do a new DOCSIS with a new physical layer underneath. It was an industry-wide effort and I tell you what, they’ve been busting their tails.”

Schmitt

Schmitt discussed the new standard at the DOCSIS 3.1 Engineering Pre-conference Symposium held in Atlanta.

The new standard for cable broadband was designed to protect the industry from competing technologies — notably fiber to the home service which offers immediate gigabit broadband capacity. DOCSIS 3.1 was designed to support up to 10/1Gbps speeds using larger spectrum bands cable operators are opening for data services after switching off analog cable television channels.

Cable operators are not expected to offer gigabit broadband service in most areas. Many operators still dedicate the largest amount of their available bandwidth to analog cable television channels. But DOCSIS 3.1 provides scalability as operators move towards digital television delivery. It also offers 50 percent more data capacity over DOCSIS 3.0 over the same spectrum.

DOCSIS 3.1 uses a new modulation scheme coupled with more robust forward error correction (FEC) to improve efficiency and performance. The new standard dumps Reed-Solomon FEC in favor of low-density parity check (LDPC) technology. DOCSIS 3.1 relies on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), also used by wireless carriers to boost performance over limited spectrum.

Despite the new standard, DOCSIS 3.1 will be fully backwards-compatible with DOCSIS 3.0, which means customers buying their own cable modems will not find them obsolete anytime soon. When a customer decides they want faster broadband speeds, the cable operator can advise if a new DOCSIS 3.1 modem is needed. In most cases, it will not.

Most cable operators are expected to take at least a year lab testing the new technology and waiting for vendors to incorporate support for DOCSIS 3.1 in future generations of cable broadband equipment.

Comcast, one of the more speed-aggressive cable operators likely to be an early adopter of DOCSIS 3.1, indicated it would probably be 2015 before customers can buy DOCSIS 3.1-powered products. But Comcast will begin trials next year, according to Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture.

Time Warner Cable plans to use the next generation of DOCSIS as they migrate from conventional MPEG-based video delivery to IP video transport on a Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP). But Time Warner Cable customers don’t usually get the fastest possible broadband speeds. For most of the country, the cable operator’s top speed is 50/5Mbps.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Speaker Interview with Ralph Brown of Cable Labs at Cable Congress 2013 in London 3-11-13.mp4[/flv]

Ralph Brown, chief technology officer of CableLabs, talked about DOCSIS 3.1 and the cable industry’s future technology needs in this interview from March 2013. (5 minutes)