Arris, looking to help cable operators crank their networks over 1 Gigahertz and boost their upstream capacity, has signed a deal to market and distribute Javelin Innovations' line of taps and line passives that boost capacity to 1.8 GHz.
Under the agreement, Arris will become the exclusive reseller in North America and Latin America for Javelin's new line of Wideband HFC Taps and Line Passives. Arris said it will begin shipping the Javelin products in the first quarter of 2011.
Javelin's 1.8-GHz product line includes tap faceplate replacements, which can be installed into existing tap housings without service outages and don't require complete tap replacements or plant rebuilds.
Today, however, there aren't any commercially available cable modems or cable modem termination systems that could take advantage of that additional capacity above 1 GHz. To send video or data in that spectrum would require "future development of headend electronics and plant actives," according to Javelin CEO Wayne Davis.
But the Wideband HFC faceplate can provide MSOs with an immediate benefit, Davis added, by "cleaning up potential revenue-generating spectrum from 900 MHz to 1 GHz, the frequency range where signals of some legacy taps begin to fall off."
Javelin was formed two years ago out of the remnants of now-defunct Vyyo, which failed to get traction for its system that would expand plant capacity to 3 GHz. Privately held Javelin is owned by Gilo Ventures II, an investment fund run by former Vyyo chairman and CEO Davidi Gilo, and Goldman Sachs. Javelin is based in Englewood, Colo., with research and development in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Arris will be showing the Javelin taps and line passives at SCTE's Cable-Tec Expo here Oct. 20-22.
"Arris is pleased that our existing relationship has expanded to include Javelin's new product offerings," Bob Puccini, vice president and general manager of Arris Supplies Group. "These new products can provide immediate performance benefits for MSOs, and equip their networks for significant capacity upgrades in the future."
Javelin also makes a complete tap assembly that passes signals from 5 MHz to 2.8 GHz -- almost three times the capacity of current devices -- which requires a wide-scale replacement of existing taps and line passives.
Also Tuesday, Arris announced the "XD" cable access module for its DOCSIS 3.0-based C4 cable modem termination system that doubles downstream 6-MHz channel capacity, and a software release for the C4 that provides support for IPv6 and DOCSIS 3.0 Multicast traffic.
Initially the C4 was available with a 16-channel downstream cable access module (CAM); the XD CAMs provide 32 6-MHz downstream channels (or 24 8-MHz channels). Arris said it provides a "comprehensive program" to upgrade existing 16D CAMs to the XD CAM.
In addition, Arris announced ServAssure Compass Outage Management software, as part of its ServAssure Assurance platform. The ServAssure Compass software provides automatic identification of plant and service failures, lowering MSOs' mean time to repair (MTTR), according to the company.
ServAssure Compass is in field trials with one of the five largest North American MSOs, Arris said.
