Cable modem vendors both large and small ranked high in headlines at the recent Western Cable Show, indicating that the pieces may finally be coming together for high-speed data offerings next year.

On the show floor and in press briefings, vendors blitzed Anaheim with word of partnerships, new products and even turnkey high-speed data arrangements to help operators that are short on cash but anxious to serve up fat Internet pipes to their customers.

"It was impressive -- there are now more people making cable modems than ISDN [integrated services digital network] terminal adapters," said Emily Green, an analyst with Forrester Research. "I was relieved to see so much activity."

That activity spanned some 20 booths, many within the CableNET '96 technology showcase area, where floor traffic was heavy during all three days of the show.

Bay Networks Inc.'s LANcity division, for example, connected cable modems in 18 different booths, said Bruce Sachs, executive vice president and general manager of Bay's Internet/Telecom Business Unit.

LANcity, which claims to have more than 41,000 cable modems already installed, used the show to announce a 35,000-unit order from Cox Communications Inc. and to debut a "cable-modem six-pack" starter kit designed for smaller operators to dive into high-speed data trials for $9,995.

Bay Networks Inc. plans to become the first manufacturer with a cable modem that complies with the Multimedia Cable Network System specifications, which the MSO consortium released at the show.

Another cable-modem pioneer, Hybrid Networks Inc., announced plans to team up with Sharp Corp. and Itochu Corp. -- which owns parts of Toshiba Corp. and Time Warner Cable -- for the design, manufacture and distribution of modems.

In the deal, Sharp will license Hybrid's cable-modem technology, and Itochu will assist with distribution, said Carl Ledbetter, chairman and CEO of Hybrid.

Motorola Corp.'s Multimedia Group toasted orders from U S West Inc.'s MediaOne system in Atlanta, as well as from Cox and several international operators. Motorola executives also spent the show discussing the vendor's previously announced plan to freely license its CyberSURFR technology to any takers.

Hewlett-Packard Co., still struggling to get its QuickBurst cable modem to market, announced a manufacturing and marketing partnership with Nokia, under which Nokia will brand and distribute H-P's line in Europe.

H-P also announced orders with Helsinki Television Ltd. for up to 10,000 units, in addition to orders with four Japanese cable operators and, domestically, with Cox.

H-P executives said during a press briefing that the four Japanese operators -- Tokyo Cable Television Co., Kintetsu Cable Network, Himanari Network Co. and LCv Co. -- chose H-P based on a group study and because the operators wanted a volume-pricing deal, which the company did not detail.

Also on hand with cable-modem wares: 3Com Corp. and Com21 Inc., with its ATM based (asynchronous transfer mode) "ComPort" line.

On the floor with telco-return modems were Scientific-Atlanta Inc., with its under-$200 dataXcellerator, and General Instrument Corp., with a newly announced external version of its SURFboard modem.

Several new vendors also found their way to the Western Show:

New Media Communications Ltd. outlined its "Cyber City" cable modem. Designed as a slide-in personal computer board, the modem currently supports speeds of 5 megabits per second downstream, with a telco return. A new version, based on 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) for the downstream path, will offer MSOs 38 mbps downstream, and it is expected to be priced at $199, executives said during a press briefing.

Phasecom Inc., which introduced a T-1-speed cable modem at the National Show, used the Western Show to debut its "SpeedDemon" modem, offering speeds of up to 30 mbps downstream and 2.56 mbps upstream. The modem is scheduled for technical trials in the first quarter of 1997.

GE American Communications demonstrated a technique using Ka-band satellites for delivering high-speed data to consumers.

Based on GE's planned "Star" satellite system, which "spot-beams" data down to 350-mile zones, the proposed system would send data streams to cable headends, where they are cached and distributed to home cable-modem users, executives said.

At the component level, two manufacturers joined the growing list of integrated circuit suppliers ready to stuff cable modems with the silicon that makes them work. Lucent Technologies Inc. and LSI Logic Corp. both came out with QAM receivers optimized for cable modems, joining market-share-leader Broadcom Corp.

Stanford Telecom Corp. debuted an upstream modulator chip that operates at speeds of 20 mbps with QPSK modulation and 40 mbps with 16-QAM modulation. The $15 chip uses a Reed-Solomon encoder and scrambler to ensure robust, secure upstream communications, executives said.

Terayon Corp. released positive test results for its S-CDMA (synchronous code division multiple access) upstream system, showing that with a ruggedized approach like S-CDMA, operators can survive in the ugly 5- to 40-megahertz upstream signaling path with 98 percent error-free operation.

Beyond the manufacturing news, several companies showed up in Anaheim touting integration services and turnkey options. Racal Data Group, for example, debuted an integration deal with Bay Networks, while Convergence Systems Inc., a small, Atlanta-based integration house currently serving several high-speed data projects, inked a deal with Advanced Modular Systems Inc. for data management solutions.

Digital Equipment Corp., which formalized its "Cable Industry Network Competency Center" approach to high-speed data integration last year, also detailed its ongoing plans to nudge cable operators into the data-networking business.

Specifically, DEC is actively working with 3Com, Terayon, Bay, GI and Microsoft Corp.

Source: Multichannel News