Building the Cable Access Network for the Next Decade

When I talk with service provider customers these days about their goals, it’s a very different conversation than in the past. It’s no longer just technology and procurement people in the room; more and more, the people launching the actual services are steering the discussion. And they don’t want to hear about all the complexity of what happens in the network, or focus on cable modem termination system (CMTS) speeds and feeds.

These customers are facing stiff competitive pressure to scale bandwidth many times more than what the current network supports. They’re looking to increase top-line revenues by launching new cloud-enabled services for converged video and “Internet of Everything” (IoE) capabilities in the connected home. They’re preparing for DOCSIS3.1 and evolved Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), and they want to make it easier and less expensive to implement them. And they want to know what we’re doing to help them extend fiber deeper into the network, virtualize functions, and converge residential and business networks to lower costs.

This is a much more strategic discussion. And it’s one we’re anxious to have, because that’s exactly why we created the Cisco cBR-8 platform.

Cisco cBR-8 Leapfrogs the Competition

Cisco cBR-8 is designed from ground up for growth and the future. It converges all services (especially video), supports DOCSIS 3.1, enables distributed CCAP architectures with Remote PHY, and provides a path to virtualization—all in the same platform. These capabilities will help cable operators deploy more and better new services; simplify network operation, provisioning, and management; and become more agile. More importantly, the cBR-8 delivers all of this at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than our competition.

Other vendors are still using an ATCA chassis design that’s already bumping up against capacity limits for converging video with DOCSIS3.0. These solutions will need either new line cards and/or chassis upgrades to handle full-scale DOCSIS3.1 deployments. And even if they get these overhauls, they still can’t match Cisco’s capabilities, because the cBR-8 is designed from ground-up to last through all the industry transitions of the next decade

Don’t take my word for it. Check out this exhaustive economic analysis comparing five-year TCO for Cisco cBR-8 compared to competitive ATCA chassis.

Bottom line: if you’re going to keep pace with real-world capacity and service requirements, Cisco cBR-8 will let you scale to 9x current channels and bandwidth over the next five years with half the platforms, and a 40 percent savings in hardware, space, and power costs.

For service providers focusing on what they can do for their subscribers, their revenues, and their shareholders over the next 5-10 years, there’s only one choice out there today: Cisco-cBR-8.

Tweet us @CiscoSP360 for more questions or comments.