Cable's Upgrade Moment - Part II

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kq4ym 10/22/2016 | 12:23:50 PM

Re: Gobsmacked It should be clear that the industry is going to have to take some new roads as they acded to. feeling "a need by cable operators to increase capacity and agility with the need to keep costs and power and real-estate requirements in check." While there will be some interesting challenges there will certainly be some big changes in coming years as they journey continues for profitability and efficiency.

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msilbey 10/18/2016 | 9:45:50 AM

Whoops! Correcting a mistake I do my best down in the technical weeds of topics like distributed access architectures, but occasionally I still get something wrong. In this case, I said originally that there was no easy way to transport RF video from an integrated CCAP down a digital link to a fiber node. The statement should have read (and does now) that there's no immediate way to transport RF video from an Edge QAM device down that that digital pipe. In other words, there's incentive to move to an integrated CCAP once an operator goes the DAA route UNLESS the operator does away with RF video altogether or converts the signal coming out of the existing Edge QAM.

Got all that? If you're like me, it might take a couple of tries.

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inkstainedwretch 10/11/2016 | 7:07:32 PM

Gobsmacked At CableTec Expo, Juniper's Andy Smith (quoted in the first installment of this series), observed that Juniper can handle all the traffic of a CMTS in one-tenth of one linecard in one of its routers. There was something wistful in Smith's delivery. After all, that should be more than enough reason to kill the CMTS dead -- but it isn't. As Mari points out, the cable industry has too much invested in the things, and cable companies have been so successful with CMTSs, they've little option but to make new investments in yet more.

CMTSs need to die, but they will be around for at least another 10 years. It will be interesting to see if any particular technological approach the cable industry takes (what type of CCAP? What type of distributed architecture?) lends itself best to some later transition to off-the-shelf hardware that is not proprietary to cable.

-- Brian Santo

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