South Korea’s SK Broadband Improving the User Experience with Cisco cBR-8

Written By Igor Dayen, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

A year ago, SK Broadband announced the world’s first 10 Gbps Internet service at the 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference. This innovative new service was 100 times faster than existing services, which routinely deliver download speeds of 100 Mbps.

Today SK Broadband continues to break new ground. Just in time for the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2015, SK Broadband announced that they will deploy Cisco’s next-generation converged cable access platform (CCAP) across their national footprint. SK broadband chose Cisco’s cBR-8 as the platform to improve the user experience for their 4.7 M subscribers. In addition to supporting the rollout of multi-gigabit services the Cisco cBR-8 platform is a key part of SK Broadband‘s new network architecture.

As part of Cisco’s Evolved Programmable Network (EPN), the Cisco cBR-8 enables cable operators to create new revenue models, simplify operations and deliver new revenue-generating future and existing services. The Evolved Programmable Network is designed for web-speed agility with an open, elastic, and application centric network infrastructure. It helps organizations to transform and expand their business, and accelerate time to revenue while reducing costs and complexities of deploying new services.

In the press release, Jichang Yu, chief technology officer, SK Broadband Group, writes: “This step is part of our long term investment strategy. We are building the next generation of fixed converged networks. With the combination of Cisco’s Evolved CCAP, DOCSIS 3.1 and migration path to NFV and SDN, SKB will continue providing the best customer experience, based on the highest bandwidth and cutting edge technology.“

With the DOCSIS 3.1 capabilities of the Cisco cBR-8, SK Broadband can immediately expand to Gigabit or multi-Gigabit services. The Cisco cBR-8 provides DOCSIS 3.1 capacity and scaling in a fully converged broadband data and video platform. It’s also the only platform on the market designed for full DOCSIS 3.1 capability while maintain support for DOCSIS 3.0 services simultaneously – important when it comes to real world deployments. As the industry’s first Evolved Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), cBR-8 delivers four times the capacity and twice the speed of currently available DOCSIS 3.0 solutions in a much more cost-effective manner across an access network.

Capabilities such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will also allow customers, such as SK Broadband, to increase automation and customer self-service, thereby reducing trouble tickets and operating costs. These technologies accelerate new service deployment, as they can be developed as software-based ‘cloud’ applications–disconnected from the underlying hardware–that can be tested, and deployed at scale using MSOs’ internal cloud infrastructures.

Additionally, Brett Wingo, vice president and general manager, Cable Access Business Unit, Cisco notes that: “Cisco is working closely with SK Broadband to provide them with a future-flexible CCAP platform offering D3.0, plus D3.1 and full spectrum video to simplify the evolution of their cable access network. With this premier technology, they can cost-effectively deliver multi-Gigabit services with massive bandwidth and a rapid time to market.”

We’ve got the cBR-8 in our booth this week at SCTE. Come check it out if you’re here – or contact your account manager or partner for more information.