Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
LR Cable News Analysis  

Cable Prepares to Blend Docsis With EPON

January 25, 2012 | Jeff Baumgartner |

Cable's lovefest with EPON is going to another level with the launch of a new CableLabs qualification program for EPON gear that uses Docsis-style provisioning.

The test plan represents the next step in the CableLabs Docsis Provision of EPON (DPoE) project introduced in the fall of 2010. The resulting specs (the 1.0 version was published in March 2011) will give cable a common way to graft their Docsis provisioning systems to the EPON world, something MSOs are keen to do as they continue to deploy EPON, primarily for business-class services.

And the vendors are already lining up. Nineteen suppliers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Arris Group Inc., Broadcom Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp., participated in CableLabs's fourth DPoE interop in December.

The test program is an offshoot of the CableLabs Docsis program, but the R&D house has yet to say when it expects to conduct the first official DPoE test wave. CableLabs has another seven Docsis test waves scheduled for 2012. CableLabs also has not released what it will charge vendors for DPoE qualification testing, but, by way of example, testing a Docsis cable modem termination system (CMTS) runs $175,000.

Why this matters
With the cable industry picking EPON as its PON flavor of choice, DPoE will let MSOs and Docsis vendors preserve their legacy provisioning systems. The qualification program looks to ensure that DPoE-based gear is interoperable, giving MSOs the ability to buy from an array of vendors.

For more
Read more about cable's growing love for EPON.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Trill
A Spanning Tree alternative in Ethernet networks