Still riding an early wave of momentum in the emerging Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) market, Casa Systems has signed up a large Asian pay-TV provider for its next-gen version of the cable modem termination system (CMTS).

Casa Systems Inc. , a Boston-area startup that has jumped off to a quick start in the CCAP equipment sweepstakes, announced that it has landed StarHub as a customer for its C100G platform. StarHub, the second biggest wireline operator in Singapore with more than 530,000 video and 440,000 broadband subscribers, will replace all of its existing CMTSs with the Casa devices.

StarHub CTO Mock Pak Lum said his company, which will deploy the C100G throughout the island state, picked the C100G because it was "the best short- and long-term solution for us as it is highly scalable and gives us cost savings in operating the cable network." Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Casa, whose C100G device qualified as Light Reading's best new cable product of the year in 2013, is working to turn the cable headend box into a full-fledged, integrated CCAP device that can support both DOCSIS data and edge QAM video traffic streams. Most recently, Casa introduced an upstream module for both the C100G model and its older C10G CMTS that enables operators to widen their upstream path considerably, allowing them to leverage the greater upstream capabilities of the cable industry's new DOCSIS 3.1 spec for broadband services.

With the StarHub win, Casa has now announced CCAP deals with major cable operators in North America, Europe, and Asia. As a result, it has captured a disproportionately large share of the initial revenues in the market, which is worth only about $400 million now but is expected to reach nearly $2 billion globally by 2018 as operators replace their older CMTS and edgeQAM devices with more integrated, powerful, and efficient CCAP gear.

Casa competes most heavily in the emerging CCAP market with the cable industry's two much larger CMTS suppliers, Arris Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ARRS) and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). While Arris has also gotten off to a strong early start in the CCAP market with its E6000 platform, Cisco, the traditional leader in the CMTS area, struggled to get out of the gate with an integrated solution last year, and is now busily playing catchup with its planned next-gen platform. (See Arris Bags CCAP Deal in Germany and Cisco Makes European CCAP Score.)

Other equipment suppliers jockeying in the space include Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT) and CommScope Inc. , which are tackling CCAP from the edgeQAM device side of the business. Similar to Cisco, both Harmonic and CommScope have gotten off to relatively slow starts on the market so far.

— Alan Breznick, Cable/Video Practice Leader, Light Reading