TECHNICAL FIELD

The present invention relates to assessing signaling ingress within a communication network, such as but not necessarily limited to assessing signaling ingress associated with radio frequency (RF) signaling attenuating, influencing or otherwise interfering with other signaling being transmitted over a communication network.

BACKGROUND

Cable plants and other communication networks can suffer interference from external or over-the-air sources of radio frequency (RF) signaling when the associated energy couples into “exposed” parts of the network, such as when RF signaling associated with mobile or Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, radio and TV ingress through loose connectors, cracks, corroded cables and other similar forms. The related ingress of RF signaling, which may be referred to as ingress, can impair service delivery and customer experience by causing lower data rates, freezing pictures, blank screens, loss of service, pixelation and similar experiences. A fair amount of RF interference can come from mobile or LTE networks due to the networks associated with cable and mobile operators periodically sharing the same spectrum at the same time over different mediums, i.e., a cable network or other wired network may utilize a different medium for signaling versus a wireless or over-the-air network but both of the cable and mobile networks may simultaneously carry signaling at overlapping or common frequencies.

In the U.S., for example, mobile LTE networks operate in the 600-900 MHz band, which in the case of a cable network operating according to a Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS), can result in approximately 215 MHz out of the 300 MHz, or 70%, of the available spectrum being overlapped, i.e., the LTE signaling can overlap with 70% of the cable signaling. This overlap can translate to 36 of the channels defined in the DOCSIS 3.0 specification being overlapped and 8,600 of the sub-carriers defined in the DOCSIS 3.1 specification being overlapped. This type of relatively large spectrum overlap can increase the chances of LTE mobile networks interfering with signaling carried over a cable network depending on the condition of the associated medium. Assessing or otherwise quantifying the level of ingress or interference within cable network or other network suffering interference from outside, RF signaling, can be problematic due to difficulties and/or costs associated with actively measuring interference along physical portions the network due to such networks typically being too large for technicians to actively engage with an entirety of the network.

One non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates assessing ingress or other signaling interference within a cable plant or other similar network resulting from outside, RF signaling in a passive and/or non-intrusive manner by using measurements obtained from devices deployed in the network, such as in the case of a cable network using cable modem (CM) measurements collected by a cable modem termination system (CMTS). One non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates utilizing the ingress assessment techniques to facilitate identifying areas of ingress requiring correction and/or to facilitate identifying areas or locations where the lack of ingress may be sufficient to permit small cell or other sources of RF interference to be located.

