The engineering and optimization of the Outside Plant (OSP) is the area of expertise upon which DTI was founded in 1999 at the beginning of HSD services.
DTI work in OSP focuses on three critical areas:
- Optimization of optical links from headends and hubs to nodes
- Sweep and balancing of the HFC plant
- Analysis of Return Path networks and mitigation of ingress noise, CPD and more
Together, these three areas make or break the delivery of upstream intensive services such as HSD, voice and VoD.
From many years of experience, DTI knows that few outside plants—perhaps fewer than 10%—are ready to support the new services they will need to deliver. It is all too common to find that the power levels and frequency responses in various legs of the outside plant are barely adequate for the services they support today, and that the addition of new services can easily saturate lasers, and overwhelm amplifiers with distortion and noise, leading to unmanageable carrier-to-noise or carrier-to-distortion ratios, resulting in service interruptions.
As experts in solving challenges driven by new services, a large part of DTI’s business is in OSP and associated headend/hub engineering and optimization to assure network readiness for higher speed internet access, voice, VoD and HDTV. Often the work we do in OSP falls outside the scope of any one equipment vendor or even any particular engineering organization. In fact, equipment vendors often recommend us—or engage us—to assure that their customers’ OSP is prepared to support the services the equipment is designed to deliver.
Our work in OSP is one of many examples of how we solve problems where others don’t know to look, or will not look. Our work in OSP underscores our role in the industry as experts in end-to-end success.
