Vecima nears production stage on 'GAP' node

A standardized node that can snap in a wide range of interoperable service modules like so many Lego bricks is nearing the deployment stage some five years after the cable industry first took on the project.

That project, dubbed the Generic Access Platform (GAP), standardizes the node housing and the innards that support service modules that can run edge compute applications as well as multiple access network technologies, including DOCSIS, PON and wireless.

Rooted to a relatively new set of SCTE standards, Vecima's first GAP node is being "stretched in the labs" today and is "moving into the production stage very soon," Clay McCreery, Vecima's chief operating officer, said during a briefing at last week's SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

That stage in GAP's evolution is taking place nearly three years after Vecima acquired the intellectual property that ATX Networks had developed for GAP, including drawings and schematics for the GAP node housings themselves.

Initial deployments of GAP nodes are expected to support cable's DOCSIS-powered services as well as distributed access architecture (DAA) upgrades that can house new remote PHY devices (RPDs) and PON modules for targeted fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployments. Down the line, cable operators could use GAP nodes to house 5G radios or support their focused deployments of CBRS spectrum.

Related:Vecima scoops up ATX's 'GAP' node tech

Charter is keen on GAP

Standards-based GAP nodes are expected to attract interest from multiple cable operators. However, Charter Communications has been the project's primary champion.

Charter, which showed off Vecima's GAP node at its own booth at last week's Cable-Tec Expo, is expected to use the new standards-based nodes for an ambitious hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) upgrade. That upgrade is targeting multi-gigabit downstream speeds and 1-Gig upstream speeds across Charter's markets, including a portion of the HFC network that will be upgraded to DOCSIS 4.0, at a cost of roughly $100 per household passed.

It's not entirely clear yet how extensively Charter will rely on new GAP nodes. However, the expectation is that Charter will cut in new GAP nodes where it can't upgrade legacy nodes to DAA with relatively simple drop-in upgrades. Fewer than half of Charter's network of nearly 200,000 nodes are expected to be candidates for brand new GAP nodes, with the balance slated for less expensive and less time-consuming DAA drop-in upgrades, according to multiple industry sources.

Charter's DAA deployment is somewhat different than Comcast's. Though Comcast and Charter are both going with the remote PHY option for their respective DAA upgrades, Comcast is deploying brand new (non-GAP) DAA nodes from Harmonic and CommScope rather than upgrading the innards of existing nodes. At last week's cable technology show in Denver, Comcast estimated that it had deployed more than 120,000 remote PHY nodes, more than doubling the 50,000 it had deployed at this time last year.

Related:Vecima leaps into cable's 'GAP'