ORLANDO, Fla. — Several vendors wheeled out products aimed the cable industry’s Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) at the Cable-Tec Expo show last week — though none of them will hit the high bar CableLabs spec for an integrated headend device today.
Arris announced details of its E6000 Converged Edge Router, which the company said, over time, will adopt universal edge QAM support and other features required by CCAP. The first E6000 is essentially a huge cable-modem termination system, with support for up to 1,792 downstream DOCSIS channels in a 16-rack-unit chassis.
Comcast, Arris’s biggest customer, is “excited to help them bring this to market,” Comcast senior vice president of access technology Sam Chernak said.
CommScope’s CCAP offering, based on the edge QAM solution obtained through its acquisition of LiquidXStream Systems last year, beats targets for QAM channel density but lacks DOCSIS features today.
The CommScope CCAP system will be available in two versions: the CSP 640, a nine-rackunit model with support for a maximum of 9,600 downstream QAMs and aggregate throughput of 640 Gigabits per second; and the 14-RU CSP 1280, with up to 19,200 downstream QAMs and throughput of 1.28 Terabits per second.
Harmonic, meanwhile, claimed it engineered the first “true” CCAP solution, but its NSG Pro doesn’t provide upstream DOCSIS support in the first iteration. The NSG Pro is a nine-rack-unit device that will support more than 10,000 universal edge QAMs when fully populated.
