By Michael O’Hanlon, Eric Heaton, Brendan Ryan, Richard Walsh, David Coyle, Pavel Belitskiy & Subhiksha Ravisundar, Intel Corporation – Network Platforms Group; Randy Levensalor, CableLabs
The Cable industry continues to innovate on both technical and business fronts in their Access and Edge networks to meet and exceed ever-ascendant customer demands. Currently, Distributed Access Architecture, DOCSIS 4.0, Generic Access Platform, fiber deep, Wireless Access, and virtualization are all being deployed in various permutations in order to deliver on the promises of the 10G era – high bandwidth, low latency, seamless fail-over, single user profiles, and so forth. Looking at the evolution of the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) specifically, what was once a fixed, vertically integrated, HFC CCAP appliance from a single vendor has become a virtualized CMTS (vCMTS) appliance running on commercial off the shelf (COTS) servers. This transformation into the software domain has brought the agility needed to keep up with other upgrades to the network.