Touting a strategy to bring more MSOs into the fold from around the globe, CableLabs announced that Chongqing Cable Networks of China has become the organization's 55th cable operator member.

CCN serves more than 5 million digital subs, including those taking HDTV, interactive video and broadband services, according to this blog post by CableLabs COO Chris Lammers,

“CCN’s CableLabs membership is the latest step in CableLabs ongoing effort to provide value to the cable industry on a global basis,” Lammers wrote, noting that China represents a market with nearly 250 million video subs and 15 million broadband subs. “Over the past two years, we have added new members across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, increasing total membership today to 55 members representing over 150 million video subscribers.”

That expansion, he said, provides CableLabs with scale to collaborate on tech standards and strategies on a global scale.

That focus took hold in August 2013, when CableLabs Europe merged its activities with CableLabs and began to integrate C-DOCSIS, a flavor of DOCSIS that has been tailored for the Chinese cable market. CableLabs completed the C-DOCSIS specs in the fall of 2014.

Incorporating C-DOCSIS  into the DOCSIS 3.1 platform establishes DOCSIS as a “unified standard for all markets,” Lammers said.

He said CableLabs is moving ahead with plans to add more Chinese cable operators, as well as those located in Korea, India, Thailand, Australia and Latin America.

CableLabs, Lammers added, also plans to beef up support in Asia by adding resources for the region, including collaboration with regional cable laboratories such as JLabs (Japan) and Klabs (Korea).

Arris remained the top dog from a revenue perspective in a global cable access market that raked in $445 million in the third quarter of 2014, up 8% versus the previous quarter, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.

That figure factors in worldwide revenues for cable modem termination system (CMTS), converged cable access platform (CCAP), edge QAM and coax media converter (CMC) equipment. CCAP is a next-gen high-density platform that combines the functions of the CMTS and the edge QAM, while the CMC is a stripped down form of a CMTS that is becoming popular in China and other markets that are focusing on more distributed architectures. The CMC was historically tied to C-DOCSIS, an architecture that has been integrated with the CableLabs DOCSIS specifications. 

Of that combined equipment market, Arris pulled down 50% of the revenues in the third quarter of 2014, followed by Cisco Systems (30%), Casa Systems (18%), and Harmonic (3.5%), according to Infonetics.

Cisco, once the market’s leader, could start to catch up when it releases the cBR-8, its next-gen, integrated CCAP product, for general availability. 

“Everyone is waiting for the cBR-8,” Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics, said.  “Once it’s ready, the market is going to go gangbusters.”

Not that the market’s doing shabbily now. Although shipments of total upstream and downstream DOCSIS channels, at 1.2 million, were down some on a sequential basis in the third quarter of 2014, they were up 95% versus what was shipped globally a year ago, according to Heynen.

Additionally, CCAP revenues rose 7% in the third quarter, to $360 million, versus the previous quarter. Heynen said the shift to CCAP is currently most acute in North America.

Infonetics expects the number of DOCSIS channels shipped globally to nearly triple from 2013 to 2015. According to the research firm’s current projections, about 4.5 million DOCSIS channels will ship this year, and surge past 6 million in 2015.

DOCSIS’s push into the Chinese broadband market took another step forward late last month with the publication of a specification that complete a larger suite of specs tied to C-DOCSIS, a version of an cable-focused IP platform that is taking hold in China and some other markets around the world.

Karthik Sundaresan, a principal architect at CableLabs, noted in this blog post that the C-DOCSIS System Specification (a pdf is available here) was released on August 29.

Those specs were completed just over a year after CableLabs announced that it was integrating C-DOCSIS with its broader DOCSIS initiatives, and later began to publish annexes to the DOCSIS 3.0 specs that tie in modifications for the Chinese cable market. 

As originally designed, C-DOCSIS uses regular DOCSIS 2.0- or DOCSIS 3.0-certified modems in tandem with a stripped down version of a cable modem termination system (CMTS) called the Coax Media Converter (CMC), and a CMC controller, which resides at the cable operator’s hub or headend site. The new C-DOCSIS System specs define requirements for three different distributed CMTS architectures.

The just-released system specs and the annexes already factored into DOCSIS 3.0 now comprise C-DOCSIS.

C-DOCSIS, which is being used in apartment buildings and other high-density multiple-dwelling units, has already been picked by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) as an acceptable cable access standard for a next-generation broadband project aimed that generating more competition between the nation’s cable operators and telcos.

CableLabs’ decision to fold in the C-DOCSIS work has also produced more direct participation from international MSOs. Sundaresan noted that several China-based MSOs have joined CableLabs, including WASU Digital TV Media Group Co., Shenzhen Topway Video Communication Co., Beijing Gehua CATV Co., and Jiangsu Broadcasting Cable Information Network Corp.

“These C-DOCSIS specifications are the first step in engaging our new members in China,” Sundaresan wrote.