Cisco Systems has rolled out a new line card upgrade for its flagship UBR10012 cable modem termination system that shoots for downstream speeds of more than 1 Gigabit per second by enabling the bonding of up to 32 DOCSIS 3.0 channels.
At its full potential, a D3 modem that can bond 32 6MHz-wide channels can pump out bursts of about 1.2 Gbps in North American DOCSIS environments, and up to 1.6 Gbps EuroDOCSIS networks that use 8MHz-wide channels.
Cisco is enabling the new bonding feat on its new 6 Gigabit Shared Port Adapter (6G SPA), billed as software upgrade of its 3G SPA card for the uBR10K. The enhancement boosts the number of downstream channels available for the CMTS from 1,152 to 1,728 in the same amount of rack space, Cisco said, noting that up to eight SPA line cards can be used per uBR10K CMTS. Each 6G SPA card can also support up to 144 downstream licensed per card, for a total of 1,152 6G SPA downstream channels per chassis.
Cisco, which announced the upgrade at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, said it will kick off trials of the 6G SPA capabilities with several MSOs around the globe “over the next few months.”
Cisco announced the upgrade amid new chips from Broadcom and Intel that can bond 32 DOCSIS 3.0 downstream channels. They, along with STMicroelectronics, are also developing silicon for DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging CableLabs platform that is targeting multi-Gigabit capabilities.
