Harmonic said it’s gearing up for deployments of its Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) and its dense edge QAM products with the expansion of a support services team dedicated to the vendor’s “cable edge” customers.
The Cable Edge Services unit is comprised of technical support and field engineers dedicated to providing operators with “turn-key” support for the design, deployment, migration and ongoing operations for the supplier's NSG edge QAM and, ultimately, its full CCAP product.
Rather than charging by the hour, Harmonic said it will offer the new support service on a fixed price model. Harmonic did not announce how many employees will be part of the new team in the early going.
"We're now taking our service offerings to the next level by simplifying the deployment, operations, and maintenance of the cable edge and live production networks for operators,” Harmonic SVP and GM of cable products, said in a statement. “Our expanded Cable Edge Services help our customers protect their infrastructure investment by enabling them to implement new technologies, such as CCAP, with minimal disruption as their needs and requirements change.”
Harmonic, along with Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, and CommScope, are all chasing after a CCAP market that will be worth more than $1 billion by 2017, according to Multimedia Research Group. CCAP is being billed as super-dense platform that will put all services on the same platform and put cable on a path toward an all-IP future by combining the edge QAM and cable modem termination functions.
Harmonic announced in July that it had begun to ship products based on the CableLabs-specified CCAP platform in the second quarter of 2013. Its first CCAP entry, the NSG Pro, will initially be offered as a downstream-only, edge QAM. Harmonic anticipates turning the NSG Pro into a fully integrated CCAP by adding the routing, upstream and CTMS components further down the road.
