Making further inroads in the emerging converged cable access platform (CCAP) market, Casa Systems has signed up a large Belgian cable operator for its next-gen version of the cable modem termination system (CMTS), Light Reading has learned.

Industry sources say Casa Systems Inc. , a Boston-area startup off to an early start in the potentially huge CCAP equipment market, has signed up Telenet as a customer for its C100G platform. Telenet, the largest cable operator in Belgium, with more than 2.4 million homes passed, will replace all of its existing CMTS devices with the Casa next-gen devices.

Neither company was available for comment Tuesday. But sources said Telenet will shift its consumer and commercial services off the existing CMTS platforms and onto C100G. Plans also call for Telenet to add video services and enhanced Internet access speeds in the process.

The Telenet win comes just a couple of weeks after Casa struck a deal with a large Asian pay TV provider StarHub to deploy the C100G platform. Like Telenet, StarHub, the second biggest wireline operator in Singapore with more than 530,000 video and 440,000 broadband subscribers, will replace all of its CMTSs with the Casa devices. (See StarHub Taps Casa for CCAP.)

Casa, whose C100G device qualified as Light Reading's best new cable product of the year in 2013, is seeking to turn its 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 Telenet win, Casa continues to give the industry's traditional CMTS suppliers a run for their money in the CCAP space. So far, it has captured a disproportionately large share of the market, which is only about $400 million now but is expected to reach nearly $2 billion globally by 2018 as cable operators replace their older CMTS and edgeQAM devices with more integrated, powerful, and efficient CCAP gear.

Casa competes most directly in the emerging CCAP market with the cable industry's two main CMTS suppliers, Arris Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ARRS) and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). 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.

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