As 2015 heads into its final month, a look back shows a relative dearth of CCAP-related news compared to past years and shows. Some highlights:
- Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) introduced a 10-Gig DOCSIS 3.1 CCAP, the cBR-8. The company had wins from Midcontinent Communications, SK Broadband in Korea, Quickline AG in Switzerland, and Altice in France.
- Suddenlink selected the ARRIS (NASDAQ:ARRS) E6000 Converged Edge Router. ARRIS announced several other wins as well, mainly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
- Casa Systems announced a deployment of its CCAP platform by Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) in New York City. Casa also released a DOCSIS 3.1 module.
- Harmonic (NASDAQ:HLIT) publicized a win in Germany.
- Huawei's CCAP passed DOCSIS 3.1 Interop tests.
Most recently, at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans in October, CCAP was highlighted in several demonstrations of energy efficiency, and product news came from Casa, which showcased a new remote CCAP node and a MobileEdge managed WiFi solution. ARRIS revealed that its DOCSIS 3.1 capability is forthcoming.
Illustrating the slowdown in public releases this past year, note that ARRIS alone had at least 10 customer announcements in 2014. But what does this mean, if anything? Are operators waiting for virtual or hosted CCAP solutions instead of investing in purpose-built hardware?
"The whole announcement thing might be a little misleading," said Tom Cloonan, CTO of network solutions at ARRIS. "Not all MSOs allow announcements to be made. You don't see all the things that are going on. (Also,) once a first shipment to an MSO is made, follow-on shipments are not announced in the press. There has been an incredible amount of activity. It has been clipping along at an increasing pace for the last year."
Jeff Heynen, research director for broadband access and pay TV for IHS (NYSE:IHS), agreed that the lack of news regarding CCAP deployments does not mean that there has been a slowdown.
"MSOs see CCAP as a competitive differentiator," Heynen said. "People assume that, once a CCAP announcement is made, an increase in speeds is imminent. So many MSOs are quietly deploying the physical boxes without making a huge fuss about the vendor contract."
The vendor community is focused on DOCSIS 3.1, Cloonan said. ARRIS expects to roll out DOCSIS 3.1 capability on its systems late this year for customer trials, with general availability coming next year. "Probably during the first quarter of 2016 we will hit the field with that," he said. "We are working with a lot of customers in trial mode and are getting the last few issues covered."
ARRIS also plans to cover many bases moving forward, from developing products in both the integrated CCAP and distributed CCAP spaces to being able to offer customers both remote PHY and remote MAC-PHY products.
Regarding the remote debate, Cloonan participated in a panel at Expo that looked at the pros and cons of both from the operator perspective. One that resonated was that remote MAC-PHY offers a single box and simplicity. On the other hand, remote PHY allows the already deployed headend MAC functionality to be reused. When DOCSIS bandwidth is low, the MAC processing signals can work with 10 nodes, but when the bandwidth increases, the same chunk of MAC processing can drive one node.
"There is a potential savings in doing this," Cloonan said.
Existing CCAPs also have another round of higher density, higher capacity blades. "As (MSOs) create more nodes, they will either use the newly developed blades for integrated CCAPs ... or they will move to a distributed architecture and move the CCAP functionality to the nodes," Cloonan said. "So many options give the MSOs choices."