Reaching a significant milestone in the deployment of next-gen cable access technologies, Casa Systems confirmed Monday that Time Warner Cable is delivering IP-based data and voice services and QAM-based video simultaneously in New York using the vendor’s integrated Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP).
The achievement is significant because it’s the first known deployment in North America of a CCAP that is delivering both IP and QAM services via the same platform. The CCAP, a high-density, energy-saving platform, puts the functions of the edge QAM and the cable modem termination system under the same roof. While early CCAP-facing implementations have served as either super CMTSs or edge QAMs, the TWC/Casa deployment in New York is mixing both IP- and MPEG/QAM traffic on the same platform at the same time.
According to Casa, TWC has “migrated hundreds of thousands of video subs” to the vendor’s C100G integrated CCAP (pictured), a product introduced in mid-2013.
Word of the achievement first emerged last month at a Light Reading event in Denver. “We still are the first to go out with CCAP with being able to provision MPEG-2 video on CCAP,” Mike Hayashi, the retiring executive vice president, architecture, development and engineering at TWC, said during a panel moderated by independent analyst and Multichannel News contributor Leslie Ellis. Hayashi also talked up the operational advantages of CCAP when it comes to assigning capacity to service groups and service types.
While Arris was the top provider of CCAP/CMTS gear in the fourth quarter of 2014, with a 53% share of revenues, Casa held about 23.5%, enough to move ahead of Cisco Systems’s 20%, according to Infonetics Research.
