Arris said it will use this year’s Cable Show in Los Angeles to demonstrate the DOCSIS 3.1 and Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) chops of the E6000, a chassis that is starting off as a high-density cable modem termination system (CMTS).
In a blog post, Arris said it will show the E6000, which is in the process of becoming a full-fledged integrated CCAP, supporting DOCSIS data traffic as well as QAM-based video traffic off of the same F-connector. More specifically, the E6000 will be shown handing 24 bonded DOCSIS 3.0 channels and eight QAM-based video channels.
Arris said it will also use the chassis to run a 192 MHz-wide block OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) subcarriers, giving a nod to the type of spectrum that will be used for DOCSIS 3.1, a CableLabs spec that will be more efficient than DOCSIS 3.0 and target capacities of up to 10 Gbps downstream and as much as 2 Gbps in the upstream -- if plant is built out to 1.2 GHz and operators expand the amount of spectrum dedicated to the upstream path.
Arris will be doing “extensive testing of DOCSIS 3.1this year and next,” Jeff Walker, senior director of CMTS product marketing at Arris, said in a recent interview.
CableLabs issued the DOCSIS 3.1 product specs last October, and published the “issue two” release of the product specs on March 20. CableLabs is also working on DOCSIS 3.1’s operational support systems (OSS) specs, which serve as the backoffice systems for the platform. D3.1 Those will be released this summer, according to Dan Rice, CableLabs’ senior vice president of network technologies.
An feature story on DOCSIS 3.1 developments will appear in a special technology section inside the April 28 issue of Multichannel News.
The Cable Show runs April 29 – May 1 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
