Nimrod Ben-Natan, Harmonic's new CEO, says the supplier will demo products powered by new 'unified' DOCSIS 4.0 silicon at SCTE TechExpo. He also weighed in on proposals to deliver 5G signals on HFC networks.
Harmonic says it will have products live and in the flesh that are powered by new "unified" DOCSIS 4.0 silicon from Broadcom at next week's SCTE TechExpo in Atlanta.
That lineup, which includes D4.0 fiber nodes and remote PHY devices (RPDs), will support both flavors of the specs – Full Duplex (FDX) and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD). Comcast, Harmonic's largest customer, is focused on FDX. Most other operators with D4.0 on their roadmaps are looking at ESD.
Products based on Broadcom's unified silicon will be programmable, giving operators flexibility on which angle they want to take.
The unification of those D4.0 options represents a "milestone" for the cable industry, said Nimrod Ben-Natan, a Harmonic veteran who recently succeeded the retiring Patrick Harshman as the company's new CEO.
Nimrod Ben-Natan, a long-time leader of Harmonic's broadband business, recently was named CEO, succeeding the retiring Patrick Harshman. (Source: Harmonic)
A big question going forward is when Broadcom, which collaborated with Comcast on the development of unified D4.0 chips for modems, amps and nodes, will open up access to the full industry. Access is currently limited to operators that have signed pricey joint development agreements (JDAs) with Broadcom. Comcast, Charter Communications, Liberty Global, Cox Communications and Rogers Communications are among the operators in that group.
Harmonic is currently shipping FDX-only versions of DOCSIS 4.0 products, and the pace of deployment "has been ramping up during the course of this year," Ben-Natan said. Comcast, which has launched D4.0 in parts of three markets, is the likely recipient of those. Comcast is also the marquee customer for cOS, a virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS) from Harmonic that is equipped to support DOCSIS 4.0 as well as fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) access networks.
Ben-Natan expects Harmonic to make products based on unified DOCSIS 4.0 silicon generally available in the first half of 2025. But next week's show will offer an early look at Harmonic's handiwork.
Harmonic is also focused on supporting an upgraded version of DOCSIS 3.1 (sometimes called DOCSIS 3.1 extended or DOCSIS 3.1+) that will deliver up to 8 Gbit/s downstream (along with 1 Gbit/s to 1.5 Gbit/s in the upstream) via four to five orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) channels in new D3.1 modems and D4.0 modems and CMTS software updates. Harmonic, which uses the marketing label "BoostD 3.1," has trials underway.
Notably, access to D3.1 technology is not limited by the Broadcom JDA.
Both D4.0 and D3.1+ provide some potential paths forward for operators that intend to extend the lives of their hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks with fiber-like performance.
"Ultimately, everyone wants to go fiber. The problem is the time that it takes and the capital intensity … and how to maintain your customer base while you retool your network," Ben-Natan said.
But cable operators, he points out, also have the option to offer fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) off the node on a targeted basis when they upgrade to a distributed access architecture (DAA), a prerequisite for D4.0. That "fiber-on-demand" model "is really a winning strategy that, over the next seven years, will help operators increase their fiber penetration without leaving customers behind on a legacy network," Ben-Natan said.
5G over HFC 'an interesting study'
Alongside advanced forms of DOCSIS, the cable industry is abuzz about other potential options, including the notion of running 5G signals on HFC in spectrum above 1.2GHz – perhaps in the neighborhood of 4GHz or 5GHz. Charter, Rogers and CableLabs have been exploring the idea under a project called Next-Gen Radio over Coax, or NRoC. A startup, called Air5, is developing a product line that would allow 5G traffic to be overlayed onto the cable network.
Ben-Natan is not yet sold on the idea and believes it will take time to develop – time that cable operators might not have given the competitive pressures they're presently facing.
"At this point I would define it as an interesting study," he said of the 5G-on-HFC concept. "I'm sure it can be demonstrated, but it has to go through some cycle to prove the technology in the lab and in the field, and that takes time."
Ben-Natan also warns that cable operators will also be faced with operational challenges if they start to add 5G signals to the wireline network.
Meanwhile, operators already have access to new technology with unified DOCSIS 4.0 that will boost HFC performance.
"Cable doesn't have infinite time to develop a new technology," Ben-Natan said. "They have to do something today to maintain the competitive level of their network. We all compete with fiber, so we can't take another three years to develop a new technology and then start rolling it out. It might be too late."
But he allows that if 5G-on-HFC technology is proven out, Harmonic would "look for opportunities around that."
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