Nokia said it has wrapped up its acquisition of Gainspeed, a startup that has specialized in the development of a “virtual” Converged Cable Access Platform.
Nokia said Gainspeed’s product lineup will complement its current fiber access technologies for cable operators. Gainspeed will operate as part of Nokia’s Fixed Networks business group.
The deal gives Nokia a CCAP product that will enable it to compete in the next-gen cable access market against suppliers such as Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, Huawei, and Harmonic.
Founded in 2012 by Shlomo Rakib, a DOCSIS pioneer and co-founder of Terayon Communication Systems (sold to Motorola in 2007), Sunnyvale, Calif.- based Gainspeed was founded in 2012. It raised about $55 million from investors that include NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures, Technicolor and Juniper Networks, which led Gainspeed's "B" round.
Nokia, which announced its agreement to acquire Gainspeed on June 9, has not revealed financial terms of the deal. Nokia is scheduled to announce Q2 earnings on Thursday, Aug. 4.
High-level engineering execs from Comcast, Liberty Global and WideOpenWest all praised Nokia’s acquisition of Gainspeed when it was announced. Of that group, WOW said it was testing Gainspeed’s platform and “preparing for deployment.”
Gainspeed’s approach with a virtual CCAP distributes the MAC and PHY to the edges of the network while centralizing the control and management of the network in the data center.
Among its competitors, Arris last week noted that it is making “great progress” on remote PHY products that place the physical access layer of the DOCSIS CMTS into the fiber node and is also developing a “virtual DOCSIS core” that would appear to be directly competitive with the Gainspeed approach.
