As we have just come back from the holidays and spent time with family and loved ones, I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at 2016 and provide you with some of the highlights for Cisco in Cable Access over the year.
In May 2016 we celebrated the first birthday of the cBR-8, our evolved CCAP. Being deployed by customers around the world we now have more than 18 Million subscribers using the cBR-8 as their means to get access to the Internet. The cBR-8 is the first CCAP providing DOCSIS® 3.1 capabilities in the industry, it will be the first CCAP providing Remote Phy DOCSIS® in the industry in 2017. Delivering unprecedented scaling and proven investment protection to our customers.
But that is not the only thing that happened in 2016…
Open-RPD for Remote Phy was announced in February, 2016, the main goal is to drive Remote Phy enablement and to ensure improved interoperability between member vendors. It is the first Open source initiative for DOCSIS® as such and many vendors have become member of the Open-RPD forum and are actively contributing to the software.
Full Duplex DOCSIS® (FDX), a new tool for MSO’s to unleash the full potential of DOCSIS® was also announced early in 2016. FDX builds on top of the foundation laid down by Remote Phy, work is in progress for the FDX specification. Let us look at some of the advantages of FDX;
- It increases the upstream bandwidth by 10x to 50x, creating a big pipe of bandwidth
- There is no downstream spectrum reduction when the upstream spectrum expands
- Aligns HFC bandwidth growth with FTTH
- OOB (Out of band) at 74 MHz and FM no longer blocks upstream spectrum growth
FDX is the latest tool for the industry to ensure its competitiveness from a technology perspective, allowing MSO’s worldwide to continue to differentiate with their Cable DNA.
That basically sums it up for 2016, I am looking forward to the exciting things happening in Cable in 2017, the first deployments of Remote Phy, the introduction of the first Cloud Native CMTS? Where will Full Duplex DOCSIS® be in one year time? Enough developments and innovations to ensure a very interesting 2017.
I wish you all happy holidays and a great time with the family.
Full duplex has a great history, it worked out great in a lot of areas. It looks like the old becomes the new again. Some cellular things really had the pulse of the user. Amazing who sets the pace of some technology.
Thanks, Daniel. It’s interesting
Thanks, Daniel. It’s interesting
Really looking forward to seeing FDX become reality. It’s always nice when something transitions from “black magic” to product.
Make sure that big pipe doesn’t spring any leaks, or you’ll have the digital environmentalists after you for spilling packets. 😉