Executive Summary
This document is part of a series providing the cable operator with a standard reference to determine how well a piece of equipment performs in terms of minimizing the power required to do its particular job. In addition, this standard provides the means to quantify the amount of useful work the equipment provides per physical space. This part of the series focuses on Wi-Fi equipment serving the cable industry including Wi-Fi controllers, access points, and gateway servers.
Scope
Cable operator networks are large expansive networks that involve hundreds if not thousands of miles of coaxial or fiber cable powered by power supplies in the outside plant and connecting customers to critical infrastructure facilities such as hubs, headends, data centers, regional, and national distribution datacenters. In these facilities is a vast array of equipment responsible for the production and support of the cable operator’s products and services such as voice, video, data, home automation and security, and Wi-Fi. The importance of powering all of these devices in the critical facilities is ever increasing as the customer expectation is for 100% availability due to the critical nature of the services being provided to business and residential customers. This document defines how to use a standard methodology to measure the density of hardware to meet the needs of optimizing critical space, as well as measuring energy consumption for the various network element classes. This part of the series focuses on indoor critical facility Wi-Fi equipment types, gateway servers and Wi-Fi controllers as well as outdoor strand-mounted Wi-Fi access points.
Benefits
This standard defines energy and functional density specific performance metrics based on service features that are inherent to the type of equipment. Standard metrics such as watts per client and watts per throughput for cable network equipment are identified. This standard will contribute to improve the overall energy footprint by enabling engineering driven decisions that reduce energy consumption at the source of power consumption.
Intended Audience
Cable operator headend, hub, and outside plant engineers, procurement teams, and operations staff.