Our time is that of an insatiable appetite for fresh, new information, taking and giving, alone and in unison; from grandma who Skypes with the grandkids, to the boy that has never known linear television, to the masses who can Tweet a country to political change in a matter of days, and everyone else on Facebook.
Access platforms are built for their time and the successful ones are a complement of technologies that work towards a particular goal. So what is the access platform of our time? What does it do? How does it scale? What key technologies does it integrate to facilitate the services the cable industry aims to provide? In this paper we propose an optical RF transmitter that allows integration of HFC optics into next generation CMTS platforms facilitating all-IP transmission and allowing power and footprint reductions through the use of 10 Gbps optics, such as is found in XFP packages.