Proactive Network Maintenance: Ingress Mitigation

The cable industry has significantly stepped up their efforts to create tools to monitor and detect faults in the network/home. The DOCSIS PNM tools developed in part with Cable Labs are a prime example of the evolution of solutions that are available that can provide a wealth of data to better understand the types of faults that are occurring in the network. Leakage detection solutions have also advanced and evolved to provide enhanced frequency coverage to uncover many new shielding integrity problems that are the major source of cable plant ingress.

While the ability to detect faults has had significant improvements, the “Fix” part of the equation still continues to be a big challenge. To be more specific, once a problem has been detected within a general area or home, the task then falls to finding the exact cause of the problem. Here is a prime example: A home is checked for return path ingress as part of a standard home health check. A large amount of ingress is found. Ok… now what? The problem has been detected, but what tools does the technician have to quickly determine the cause of the problem without randomly replacing connectors, cables, etc.?

ComSonics has developed a powerful and easy-to-use solution set that directly addresses the “fix” issue to help mitigate both return-path and downstream ingress, which is now becoming a bigger issue due to LTE. The idea is to create “high pressure” within the cable network that exposes any and all ingress points. This is analogous to doing a high pressure water test to insure the plumbing in your home is not leaking. The tech then needs an easy and efficient tool to find where the faulty points are in the network. The ComSonics Mini-Mobile-Marker or M3 is a portable device that the technician uses to create a special high level RF signal within a localized cable network, such as a home or apartment building. The technician then uses the new ComSonics QAM Compass to find any weak points in the network that are sources of ingress or egress. This is a very powerful tool set that has been proven to work extremely well. An example is shown in Figure 1 of a damaged cable that was hidden behind a kitchen cabinet. This problem was only revealed and found once the high pressure M3 signaling was applied to the house. Returning to the earlier example where ingress is found using a SLM, the M3 and QAM Compass now provide the technician a solution to quickly and easily root out the ingress points for a confident fix. These tools are now being used by a number of cable operators as part of a proactive maintenance program to quickly troubleshoot in-home wiring, mitigate ingress issues, and qualify and QC: cable drops, new installations, cabinets, MDUs, etc.

To learn more about this or other ComSonics Product Solutions, call 800-336-9681 or email marketing@comsonics.com.