2025 poised to be a 'big year' for the virtual CMTS, says Vecima COO

Building on the software it developed for the MACPHY architecture, Vecima is gearing up for lab and field trials of its new vCMTS as operators begin to plot plans for DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades, says COO Clay McCreery.

Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor

March 19, 2024

Vecima Networks jumped in the virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS) fray earlier this month, announcing a new, virtualized platform under the "Entra" brand that has already been cleared for lab trials with an unnamed Tier 1 North American cable operator.

The move will pit Vecima against three others in the vCMTS sector – Harmonic, the market leader, CommScope and Casa Systems.

Speaking at Light Reading's Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies event in Denver, Vecima Chief Operating Officer Clay McCreery noted that the move into the vCMTS was not a huge jump for the company. That's because the bulk of the software elements comprising a vCMTS were already in place thanks to Vecima's pioneering work on remote MACPHY, an option for distributed networks that extends both the PHY layer and the media access control processing components of the CMTS out at the node.

Vecima expects its vCMTS to be ready for field trials by the end of 2024, setting the stage for deployments in 2025.

"Calendar 2025 is going to be a big year for people making that move," McCreery said. "It's really important for us to intersect the introduction of DOCSIS 4.0 with the virtual CMTS."

Below is a snapshot of topics that McCreery discussed (click the closed captioning button on the player for a lightly edited transcript):

McCreery on why Vecima entered the virtual CMTS fray and how its earlier work on MACPHY helped to lead the way (00:40)
How Vecima intends to differentiate in a vCMTS market that now has three other players in the mix – Harmonic, Casa Systems and CommScope (01:50)
Why McCreery believes 2025 is setting up to become a "big year" for the vCMTS based on operator interest in making the move (03:10)
What segment of the market is gravitating to the remote MACPHY option for a distributed access architecture (DAA) and why (04:40)
The subtle differences between nodes tagged for remote PHY and remote MACPHY architectures (05:50)

About the Author(s)

Jeff Baumgartner

Jeff Baumgartner

Senior Editor, Light Reading

Jeff Baumgartner is a Senior Editor for Light Reading and is responsible for the day-to-day news coverage and analysis of the cable and video sectors. Follow him on X and LinkedIn.

Baumgartner also served as Site Editor for Light Reading Cable from 2007-2013. In between his two stints at Light Reading, he led tech coverage for Multichannel News and was a regular contributor to Broadcasting + Cable. Baumgartner was named to the 2018 class of the Cable TV Pioneers.

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