The cable industry is billing its big 10G initiative as the next big technology star. But given the current state of the cable access technology business, is it even ready for primetime?

Cable’s counter to the wireless business’s all-encompassing 5G hype bonanza, 10G actually incorporates many different technologies, all aiming to extend hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks beyond speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and into lifespans stretching out another two or three decades.

But within that big 10 Gbps bucket is a lot of new, disruptive technology for cable operator engineers to digest, some of it competing with each other.

For starters, the shift to Distributed Access Architecture, in which headend and network functions are virtualized, has been described as the biggest technological change the cable industry has made since it migrated to HFC back in the early 1990s. Indeed, transitioning from a centralized Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) architecture to DAA is proving to be a highly complex process, affecting everything from core plant operation to the skill sets required from workers. “The migration from centralized access architecture to DAA has certainly proven to be more complex when compared to prior upgrade cycles,” said Sean Welch, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Cable Access Business.

Related: Cisco Access Chief Welch: 'Don't Wait' to Transform Network Infrastructure

The shift to DAA is but one — admittedly huge — piece of the engineering puzzle. As chief technology officers and their teams reimagine their HFC networks for the futuristic era of autonomous cars, they’re also mulling pressure to move away from large proprietary hardware appliances, such as the cable modem termination system (CMTS), and move the work these devices do to off-the-shelf servers that will virtualize these processes.

As if that weren’t enough disruption, cable technologists are split as to which next iteration of DOCSIS (the standard that enables high-bandwidth data transfer over HFC) will best deliver 10G’s bandwidth promise. Led by Comcast, the industry had seemed to be lined up nice and neatly to adopt CableLabs’s Full Duplex DOCSIS standard (FDX). But due to a variety of issues, some operators are pushing FDX aside in favor of alternatives such as Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and Low Latency DOCSIS.

The level of complexity and disruption operators face is certainly “not trivial,” Todd Kessler, senior vice president of product at CommScope, conceded. Kessler’s company acquired Arris, cable’s biggest technology vendor, for $7.4 billion this year. At the SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans this week (Sept. 30-Oct. 3), Kessler said, CommScope will seek to position itself as a “strategic adviser” to its operator customers, “giving them all the facts they need to make good decisions.”

A No Good, Very Bad Year for Vendors

Certainly, for cable access vendors, some decisions would be nice.

Sales were down 38% sector-wide in the first quarter, according to research company Dell’Oro Group, which attributed much of the stalling to cable operators weighing DAA-related decision-making. And Dell’Oro on Sept. 25 published a report which found cable access equipment sales were down 40% in Q2. The demand just isn’t there right now, the firm said.

”I think we all have to keep in mind that many of the largest operators have been on a consistent, six-year cycle of purchasing and deploying capacity as they moved from DOCSIS 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.0 to 3.1,” Dell’Oro senior analyst Jeff Heynen said. “At some point, that cycle had to stop, even for a little bit, for the operators to deploy all that capacity.”

And stop the cycle has.

CommScope has let go most of Arris’s top-level management, including ex-CEO Bruce McClelland, with its network and cloud division reporting a 37% revenue slide to $344 million in the second quarter.

Cisco Systems, the second biggest cable-access supplier behind CommScope, doesn’t break out numbers for that sector. But it recently put a halt to the development of Full Duplex DOCSIS, and key executives, including former cable-access strategy chief John Holobinko, have left the company.

Revenue at Casa Systems did rebound 47% from a really tough Q1. But its $52 million in second-quarter sales were still off around 28% year-over-year.

Harmonic, which is disrupting the hegemony enjoyed by CommScope, Cisco and Casa with its virtual CCAP product, CableOS, saw revenue fall 14% in the second quarter. This was despite customer wins for CableOS that included a $175 million multiyear deal with Comcast, and another $55 million contract with an unnamed European operator widely believed to be Liberty Global. In the latest news, Harmonic said Comporium Communications in Rock Hill, South Carolina, had signed on to use CableOS in a new DAA configuration supporting DOCSIS 3.1 services.

Still, Kessler doesn’t see the overall cable access business perking up until next year. “We thought more operators would be past the evaluation phase by now,” he said.

Notes from rival cable access vendors jibe with this prediction.

“While we do expect MSOs to increasingly redirect investment into Distributed Access Architecture, we continue to believe that we haven’t yet reached an inflection point away from the industry-wide pause in cable spending,” Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo said during a second-quarter earnings call in late July. Observing the industry from a more detached perch as CEO of Pineville, North Carolina’s Chamber of Commerce, Holobinko said he believes key issues regarding HFC aren’t being addressed by the new 10G tech.

“I agree there are too many technologies and all seem to be lacking the one thing that a mature industry needs — a solution to high operating costs,” the former Cisco technologist told Multichannel News. “The biggest challenge with cable access networks is, when compared to fiber and wireless networks, the day-to-day cost of operating and maintaining the cable plant is an order of magnitude higher than competitive access technologies.”

With this in mind, might cable operators start to seriously look at ditching HFC and going with fiber-to-the-home? There would certainly be operational efficiencies. The transition doesn’t come cheaply, though, as shown by Altice USA’s $5 billion FTTH initiative in its Optimum footprint.

While 2018’s Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta was full of tour de force white-paper presentations and demonstrations of FDX, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and Low Latency DOCSIS, vendors seem to be approaching this year’s New Orleans event with compromise solutions aimed at taking some of the pain points away.

For several years, the FDX standard from industry consortium CableLabs was widely viewed as the next iteration of DOCSIS, a standard that would someday delivery symmetrical 10 Gbps speeds over HFC networks.

But FDX presents certain inflexibilities. Notably, it requires an expensive “fiber deep” strategy, with no amplification permitted between the node and customer. Despite the support of Comcast, FDX has lost the customer volume needed for wide-scale vendor support, as evidenced by Cisco’s pullback over the summer.

CommScope will be demoing what it calls “Extended Soft Frequency Division Duplex,” which combines elements of both FDX and ESD. Rather than dictating symmetrical bandwidth, the technology allows operators to move bandwidth from downstream to upstream and vice versa, as desired.

Extended Soft FDD is more “amplifier friendly” than FDX, said Chris Busch, CommScope engineering fellow in the office of the CTO. “That’s a big boon to the operator,” he said, describing a technology being put into another new bucket of cable industry jargon, “DOCSIS 4.0.”

What is DOCSIS 4.0 to Busch? Like 10G, the term seems to be broad.

“I think it’s the next generation of DOCSIS performance,” he said.

Beyond easing pain points for emerging DOCSIS technologies, CommScope will also try to light the path for faster uptake of DAA.

Remote PHY refers to the technique of moving the physical layer of electronic circuitry (the “PHY”) out of Converged Cable Access Platform at the headend and putting that PHY circuit at the end of the network. Remote MAC-PHY means also moving the Media Access Control layer to the edge, as well.

Converting to this scheme represents a massive shakeup.

“Many operators are still in the evaluation phase, looking at ways to deploy Remote PHY or Remote MAC-PHY,” Kessler said. “Only a handful are in deployment. And that will likely stay consistent into next year.”

Rather than showing off some splashy new performance-driven DAA gear, CommScope’s product demos at Cable-Tec Expo seem to be focused on tools that drive down costs. DAA Aggregator, for example, lets operators connect up to eight HFC nodes to one Remote PHY device (RPD). This significantly increases the number of homes passed per RPD serving group — from a range of 20-40 to 150-300.

“It’s more capital-efficient,” Busch said. “It allows operators to gain the benefits of Distributed Access Architecture without as much investment.”

We’re Just Not There Yet

While the cable technology business’s recessionary trend certainly has a lot to do with the complexity associated with new standards and their adoption, Dell’Oro analyst Heynen believes that, despite all the hype, 5G isn’t — at least not yet — putting on the kind of pressure needed to make leading operators forget how much they just spent on upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1, while enabling 1 Gbps speeds that few consumers are using.

Is it too early to make 10G the star of the show?

“I don’t think spending improves significantly until [operators] feel there is a viable competitive threat to their 1-Gig DOCSIS 3.1 services, or an application or service [emerges] that challenges the capacity they have in their access networks now,” Heynen said. “That, plus slowing bandwidth consumption rates, are the reasons for the current trough in spending. I do see spending improving in the second half of the year, but certainly nowhere near the levels seen in 2018.”

NEW ORLEANS - Charter Communications, which is currently testing a variety of uses cases of CBRS, could potentially be ready to go to market around the end of next year with an application that enables cost-effective deployment of fixed network services in rural areas.

So said Craig Cowden, senior VP of wireless tech Charter, speaking at a Light Reading-sponsored morning event this morning (Oct. 2) at the SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo convention.

Charter is currently testing the use of Citizens Broadband Radio Service in North Carolina—a market, Cowden said was selected on purpose "because we wanted a worst-case scenario for RF distribution.”

The MSO, he noted, is looking to extend fixed wireless services within the rural buffers of its footprint, but beyond the feasible reach of its hybrid fiber-coaxial network. With the FCC having just green-lit initial commercial deployment of CBRS, Charter is looking to deliver the minimum broadband speed specifications—25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps—while also offering customers in the newly claimed fixed wireless terrain triple-play services.

Assuming successful testing, Corden said initial CBRS-based fixed wireless services could start rolling out around the end of 2020.

Notably, Charter recently settled with the state of New York State, after the state sued the cable company for not fulfilling a merger-related promise to bring rural broadband to the region.

Speaking at an investor event last month, chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said Charter is currently building out some low-density broadband in New York. “We find that it’s economic. There may be an opportunity to accelerate low-density construction on the fringes of our business going forward.”

Separately, Charter is also testing CBRS in New York and Los Angeles as a means of shifting some cellular network usage for its Spectrum Mobile product off the Verizon MVNO. The scheme Charter is testing uses dual-SIMM phones that can switch between MVNO cellular and Charter’s own CBRS-based LTE network.

“We see targeted opportunities for mobile offload,” he said. “Our data shows that something like 85% of outdoor mobile traffic takes place in 15% of geographic locations.”

NEW ORLEANS - Centennial, Colorado-based cable video tech provider Evolution Digital used the Cable-Tec Expo event today to announce its latest customer win, the deployment of its eStream 4K set-top in Midcontinent Communications’ new IPTV service, which is slated to debut early next year.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Midco will deploy the Android TV-powered eStream 4K devices, along with a TiVo user interface, giving users of the managed network service access to OTT apps in the Google Play Store. The cable operator will also use Evolution Digital’s Device Manager (eDM), a software platform that provides management, control, monitoring and analytics of devices, as well as the ability to deploy software, firmware and security updates to customer devices.

In July, it was reported that Buckeye Broadband and MaxxSouth, two cable operators owned by Toledo, Ohio-based Block Communications, have deployed app-based video services powered by Evolution Digital’s full IP-based platform.

This followed a similar deployment by Missouri’s Vast Broadband, which Evolution announced in June.

“As Android TV is becoming pay-TV providers’ chosen ecosystem, Evolution Digital provides the necessary ongoing elements that come with building, certifying and maintaining Android TV in-production, while helping operators, like Midco, build a strong foundation for current and future innovation to outcompete in the market for many years to come,” said Marc Cohen, executive VP of sales and marketing for Evolution Digital, in a statement.

Added Bill Chatwell, Midco’s director of video systems: “As we begin to make a major migration to cloud-based video, we trust Evolution Digital’s expertise to help lead us in to the future of streaming, providing our customers an unparalleled TV service at scale.”

NEW ORLEANS - Nine months after the cable industry introduced its big catch phrase, “10G,” at CES in January, the man who coined that term himself, NCTA President and CEO Michael Powell, declared it to be a successful piece of marketing.

“It really is our new battle flag,” Powell said on stage of the opening session of this year’s Cable-Tec Expo event this morning. “It has restored in the minds of policy makers and the American public the importance of fixed networks, in addition to wireless networks.”

In short, Powell explained, the term has succeeded in its objective—whenever the wireless industry’s ubiquitous 5G calling card gets placed somewhere, there is an increasing awareness that the cable industry is also working on fixed networks that will deliver 10 gigabit-per-second symmetrical speeds.

However, during the opening session of the Society of Cable Telecommunications’ big annual trade event, itself titled "Raising the Bar," the question often came to mind, “When will we actually need 10 Gbps services?

After all, cable technologists entered this year’s expo having successfully festooned around 90% of the U.S. with DOCSIS 3.1-enabled 1 Gbps services. But none of the big cable companies are as of yet disclosing how many customers are actually using their pricy 1-gig services.

Certainly, the usual cadre of top-level cable technology engineers—which included Liberty Global’s Bill Warga, Comcast’s Tony Werner, CableLabs’ Phil McKinney and Charter’s Tom Adams—worked hard to sell the main convention hall ball room that there will soon come a day when applications like holographic display, virtual reality and autonomous cars will drive demand for much, much faster internet.

Adams, who serves as executive VP of field operations for Charter and will chair next year’s Cable-Tec Expo event, recalled that when he joined Charter seven years ago, the average internet speed threshold was around 15-30 Mbps. The growth of video streaming has increased that threshold to 200 Mbps - 1 Gbps, he noted.

Comcast’s top technologists, Werner, noted that 4K/HDR displays take up around 25 Mbps of bandwidth to play. “And in the next 24 to 36 months, i think will see another change in display technology, at least in one room of the house, that will consume a lot of bandwidth.”

Werner specifically highlighted the work of Light Field Lab, a start-up specializing in holograms that recently secured $28 million in funding from investors including Comcast.

Werner also noted that Comcast is well on its way to virtualizing its HFC networks, and has already converted some of its infrastructure to Remote PHY. However, at this point, the network infrastructure Comcast has upgraded to virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture is only capable of symmetrical 1-gig service

Later, noted inventor Dean Kamen took the stage to discuss with CableLabs chief McKinney all the aging-in-place and other bandwidth-intensive healthcare applications that will also soon require very high speeds and very low latency.

The two-and-a-half-hour session was wrapped by Preetha Vijayakumar, VP of enterprise network and communications services for FedEx. Citing all the bandwidth-intensive needs of the shipping industry, she noted, “It's my hope that we will get to the point where communications is cheap and ubiquitous, all across America.”

Vijayakumar left the stage declaring, “That’s the promise of 5G!”

NEW ORLEANS - Mattoon, Illinois-based Consolidated Communications has become the latest cable operator to sign onto MobiTV’s full IP video solution, MobiTV Connect.

The IPTV platform will service as the backbone of Consoidated’s CCiTV-branded video service, delivering content from nearly 200 local broadcast and national cable channels. Network brands in the fold include A+E, Crown Media Family, Disney and ESPN Media, FOX, HBO, Turner and Viacom.

The new service initially is available to subscribers in southern Maine with plans to expand service later this year.

The announcement was made from the Cable-Tec Expo event in New Orleans.

Related: MobiTV Adds $50M Funding Round

After launching its MobiTV Connect IPTV product nearly two years ago, MobiTV has around 90 U.S. pay TV partners, about half of which have fully deployed its end-to-end IP-based solution. Windstream and Fidelity Communications are its biggest clients to date.

MobiTV Connect is SaaS-based platform that allows for real-time enablement of new technologies, such as 4K, cloud DVR and voice control. The app-based system is designed to leverage off-the-shelf streaming hardware, like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, dispensing with expensive set-top rollouts.

"Partnering with MOBITV allows us to deliver a cost-effective next-generation TV service and enhanced user experience,” said Rob Koester, VP of consumer product management at Consolidated Communications, in a statement. “Consolidated also benefits from MobiTV’s IP delivery, which reduces the capital expense associated with additional hardware in the home and the ability to transition to the service without a major rip-and-replace installation.”

Added Charlie Nooney, CEO and chairman of MobiTV. “The customizable MobiTV Connect platform, combined with the fiber-optic network and customer service from Consolidated Communications, makes for a powerful app-based TV solution that prioritizes the user experience.”

NEW ORLEANS - Hoboken broadband analytics company OpenValut said it has carved out an “extension and enhancement” of its deal with Englewood, Colorado cable operator WideOpenWest (WOW).

The vendor doesn’t disclose exactly what the expansion of the relationship entails—only that it’s providing the operator with its operations, analytics and policy tools so that it can gather data on how WOW’s 800,000 customers use the internet … all in an “anonymized” way, of course.

“OpenVault’s tools provide aggregated and anonymized insight into WOW customers’ broadband habits and usage, which allows us to better manage our network so we can best deliver our innovative products and services to our customers,” said Blair Day, senior VP of product and network engineering for WOW. “As we continue to work together, OpenVault’s market insights will help us continue to understand and respond to our customers’ desires to use broadband services where they want, when they want and how they want.”

“WOW’s commitment to service quality has resulted in a robust broadband offering that continues to attract new subscribers,” added Mark Trudeau, founder and CEO of OpenVault. “We look forward to continuing and expanding our partnership with them to forecast future trends, pro-actively eliminate unexpected impairments and expedite service delivery.”

As the cable industry moseys on down to New Orleans for this year’s Cable-Tec Expo event, darkness has warshed over its access technology business. Darker than a steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night.

Sales were off 40% in the second quarter, according to research company Dell’Oro Group, as operators mull of range of innovative, transformative—yet highly disruptive—new network infrastructure tech—everything from Distributed Access Architecture to virtualization to a number of next-generation DOCSIS flavors. And this is not to mention all the capacity expansion they still haven’t grown into following the migration to DOCSIS 3.1.

Before getting on our plane, we caught up with Sean Welch, VP and GM of Cisco’s cable access business, to get some idea of how vendors are going to loosen the currently tight purse strings of operator CTOs at this year’s show.

MCN: What makes the transition to Distributed Access Archtecture so complex?

Sean Welch: The migration from CAA (centralized) to DAA (distributed) has certainly proven to be more complex when compared to prior upgrade cycles. The most recent shift from second-generation CMTS to CCAP required very minor changes to operational support systems and the back office elements to realize the benefits of the new technology.

With DAA, elements of the complete end-to-end system need to tested, verified and put into operation. Remember, we’re separating the physical RF interface from the physical chassis and relocating this “port” to a remote location in the outside plant – connected over a new layer of IP connectivity. It sounds relatively simple, but in practice many devices in the system need to be upgraded or completely changed out to support this new deployment model. This includes elements supporting legacy out-of-band control and HFC operations.

Finally, this new system needs to be provisioned, monitored and managed with a view to automating deployments, streamlining, troubleshooting and maximizing reliability of the service.

Beyond DAA, there is so much innovation happening in cable right now —virtualization, FDX, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, etc.? Can you briefly explain how all these so called "10G" technologies fit together? What's the priority?

All of the technologies cited are relevant for the cable access market and support the broader initiative of modernizing infrastructure and delivering higher levels of capacity and performance to align with the industry’s “north star” of 10G. Cisco believes that all of these technologies will play a role in achieving that vision, but timing and sequencing is critical. Each of these technologies requires a substantial investment in order to translate innovation to product. The cable access market has historically benefited from broad economies of scale based on an aligned view around architectural and technology evolution. We remain confident that the industry view will consolidate as operators and vendors (system and silicon) work together to define requirements and timing of deployments.

What do you see as being the business outlook for the cable access biz for the next 18 months?

We remain bullish about the market opportunity over the next 18 months and beyond. Over 180 million broadband subscribers around the world depend on DOCSIS/HFC based infrastructure to deliver connectivity and experience based services that impact their daily lives. The demand for bandwidth remains strong and we’re starting to see the demand for high performance, low latency bandwidth emerge.

How will Cisco craft its marketing message at Cable-Tec Expo? What are the central themes?

Our central theme is that Cisco is uniquely positioned to help operators transform their cable access infrastructure with technology that is available now—“don’t wait.” Our broad portfolio of solutions touch every aspect required to modernize an end-to-end cable access system. The core of our value proposition starts with our Remote PHY technology (core, edge and provisioning). R-PHY is supported by the industry’s very best physical CCAP and routing technology, complemented by our network automation and management solutions. As customers move to cloud native, Cisco’s virtualized CCAP software running on our world-class data center servers is a powerful combination. Couple that with our expertise in data center networking and add app dynamics into the mix, and all the pieces for real transformation fall into place. A critical part of the story is security. As the industry moves from a central to distributed architecture, the threat surface of the network grows and must be protected—who better than Cisco, the leading security vendor for enterprise, to provide security and trust to your critical infrastructure? Finally, when it comes to tying this all together, Cisco’s customer experience services organization offers “reduce risk and speed time to revenue.”

And finally, how do you define "DOCSIS 4.0" and "10G"?

DOCSIS 4.0 is a set of technical specifications defining the evolution of the infrastructure. This includes Full-Duplex DOCSIS and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and other elements of the system. 10G is the industry’s vision for the evolution of wireline broadband access, including HFC/DOCSIS, to deliver 10 Gigabit symmetrical services. That’s how we see it. 

The cable industry is billing its big 10G initiative as the next big technology star. But given the current state of the cable access technology business, is it even ready for primetime?

Cable’s counter to the wireless business’s all-encompassing 5G hype bonanza, 10G actually incorporates many different technologies, all aiming to extend hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks beyond speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and into lifespans stretching out another two or three decades.

But within that big 10 Gbps bucket is a lot of new, disruptive technology for cable operator engineers to digest, some of it competing with each other.

For starters, the shift to Distributed Access Architecture, in which headend and network functions are virtualized, has been described as the biggest technological change the cable industry has made since it migrated to HFC back in the early 1990s. Indeed, transitioning from a centralized Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) architecture to DAA is proving to be a highly complex process, affecting everything from core plant operation to the skill sets required from workers. “The migration from centralized access architecture to DAA has certainly proven to be more complex when compared to prior upgrade cycles,” said Sean Welch, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Cable Access Business.

Related: Cisco Access Chief Welch: 'Don't Wait' to Transform Network Infrastructure

The shift to DAA is but one — admittedly huge — piece of the engineering puzzle. As chief technology officers and their teams reimagine their HFC networks for the futuristic era of autonomous cars, they’re also mulling pressure to move away from large proprietary hardware appliances, such as the cable modem termination system (CMTS), and move the work these devices do to off-the-shelf servers that will virtualize these processes.

As if that weren’t enough disruption, cable technologists are split as to which next iteration of DOCSIS (the standard that enables high-bandwidth data transfer over HFC) will best deliver 10G’s bandwidth promise. Led by Comcast, the industry had seemed to be lined up nice and neatly to adopt CableLabs’s Full Duplex DOCSIS standard (FDX). But due to a variety of issues, some operators are pushing FDX aside in favor of alternatives such as Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and Low Latency DOCSIS.

The level of complexity and disruption operators face is certainly “not trivial,” Todd Kessler, senior vice president of product at CommScope, conceded. Kessler’s company acquired Arris, cable’s biggest technology vendor, for $7.4 billion this year. At the SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans this week (Sept. 30-Oct. 3), Kessler said, CommScope will seek to position itself as a “strategic adviser” to its operator customers, “giving them all the facts they need to make good decisions.”

A No Good, Very Bad Year for Vendors

Certainly, for cable access vendors, some decisions would be nice.

Sales were down 38% sector-wide in the first quarter, according to research company Dell’Oro Group, which attributed much of the stalling to cable operators weighing DAA-related decision-making. And Dell’Oro on Sept. 25 published a report which found cable access equipment sales were down 40% in Q2. The demand just isn’t there right now, the firm said.

”I think we all have to keep in mind that many of the largest operators have been on a consistent, six-year cycle of purchasing and deploying capacity as they moved from DOCSIS 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.0 to 3.1,” Dell’Oro senior analyst Jeff Heynen said. “At some point, that cycle had to stop, even for a little bit, for the operators to deploy all that capacity.”

And stop the cycle has.

CommScope has let go most of Arris’s top-level management, including ex-CEO Bruce McClelland, with its network and cloud division reporting a 37% revenue slide to $344 million in the second quarter.

Cisco Systems, the second biggest cable-access supplier behind CommScope, doesn’t break out numbers for that sector. But it recently put a halt to the development of Full Duplex DOCSIS, and key executives, including former cable-access strategy chief John Holobinko, have left the company.

Revenue at Casa Systems did rebound 47% from a really tough Q1. But its $52 million in second-quarter sales were still off around 28% year-over-year.

Harmonic, which is disrupting the hegemony enjoyed by CommScope, Cisco and Casa with its virtual CCAP product, CableOS, saw revenue fall 14% in the second quarter. This was despite customer wins for CableOS that included a $175 million multiyear deal with Comcast, and another $55 million contract with an unnamed European operator widely believed to be Liberty Global. In the latest news, Harmonic said Comporium Communications in Rock Hill, South Carolina, had signed on to use CableOS in a new DAA configuration supporting DOCSIS 3.1 services.

Still, Kessler doesn’t see the overall cable access business perking up until next year. “We thought more operators would be past the evaluation phase by now,” he said.

Notes from rival cable access vendors jibe with this prediction.

“While we do expect MSOs to increasingly redirect investment into Distributed Access Architecture, we continue to believe that we haven’t yet reached an inflection point away from the industry-wide pause in cable spending,” Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo said during a second-quarter earnings call in late July. Observing the industry from a more detached perch as CEO of Pineville, North Carolina’s Chamber of Commerce, Holobinko said he believes key issues regarding HFC aren’t being addressed by the new 10G tech.

“I agree there are too many technologies and all seem to be lacking the one thing that a mature industry needs — a solution to high operating costs,” the former Cisco technologist told Multichannel News. “The biggest challenge with cable access networks is, when compared to fiber and wireless networks, the day-to-day cost of operating and maintaining the cable plant is an order of magnitude higher than competitive access technologies.”

With this in mind, might cable operators start to seriously look at ditching HFC and going with fiber-to-the-home? There would certainly be operational efficiencies. The transition doesn’t come cheaply, though, as shown by Altice USA’s $5 billion FTTH initiative in its Optimum footprint.

While 2018’s Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta was full of tour de force white-paper presentations and demonstrations of FDX, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and Low Latency DOCSIS, vendors seem to be approaching this year’s New Orleans event with compromise solutions aimed at taking some of the pain points away.

For several years, the FDX standard from industry consortium CableLabs was widely viewed as the next iteration of DOCSIS, a standard that would someday delivery symmetrical 10 Gbps speeds over HFC networks.

But FDX presents certain inflexibilities. Notably, it requires an expensive “fiber deep” strategy, with no amplification permitted between the node and customer. Despite the support of Comcast, FDX has lost the customer volume needed for wide-scale vendor support, as evidenced by Cisco’s pullback over the summer.

CommScope will be demoing what it calls “Extended Soft Frequency Division Duplex,” which combines elements of both FDX and ESD. Rather than dictating symmetrical bandwidth, the technology allows operators to move bandwidth from downstream to upstream and vice versa, as desired.

Extended Soft FDD is more “amplifier friendly” than FDX, said Chris Busch, CommScope engineering fellow in the office of the CTO. “That’s a big boon to the operator,” he said, describing a technology being put into another new bucket of cable industry jargon, “DOCSIS 4.0.”

What is DOCSIS 4.0 to Busch? Like 10G, the term seems to be broad.

“I think it’s the next generation of DOCSIS performance,” he said.

Beyond easing pain points for emerging DOCSIS technologies, CommScope will also try to light the path for faster uptake of DAA.

Remote PHY refers to the technique of moving the physical layer of electronic circuitry (the “PHY”) out of Converged Cable Access Platform at the headend and putting that PHY circuit at the end of the network. Remote MAC-PHY means also moving the Media Access Control layer to the edge, as well.

Converting to this scheme represents a massive shakeup.

“Many operators are still in the evaluation phase, looking at ways to deploy Remote PHY or Remote MAC-PHY,” Kessler said. “Only a handful are in deployment. And that will likely stay consistent into next year.”

Rather than showing off some splashy new performance-driven DAA gear, CommScope’s product demos at Cable-Tec Expo seem to be focused on tools that drive down costs. DAA Aggregator, for example, lets operators connect up to eight HFC nodes to one Remote PHY device (RPD). This significantly increases the number of homes passed per RPD serving group — from a range of 20-40 to 150-300.

“It’s more capital-efficient,” Busch said. “It allows operators to gain the benefits of Distributed Access Architecture without as much investment.”

We’re Just Not There Yet

While the cable technology business’s recessionary trend certainly has a lot to do with the complexity associated with new standards and their adoption, Dell’Oro analyst Heynen believes that, despite all the hype, 5G isn’t — at least not yet — putting on the kind of pressure needed to make leading operators forget how much they just spent on upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1, while enabling 1 Gbps speeds that few consumers are using.

Is it too early to make 10G the star of the show?

“I don’t think spending improves significantly until [operators] feel there is a viable competitive threat to their 1-Gig DOCSIS 3.1 services, or an application or service [emerges] that challenges the capacity they have in their access networks now,” Heynen said. “That, plus slowing bandwidth consumption rates, are the reasons for the current trough in spending. I do see spending improving in the second half of the year, but certainly nowhere near the levels seen in 2018.”

Harmonic announced a version of its CableOS virtualized software solution that includes containerized DOCSIS CMTS and PON applications, enabling converged delivery of broadband-over-cable and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services.

The San Jose, California-based technology company made the announcement entering the Cable-Tec Expo event in New Orleans.

The debut of the new version comes as Harmonic’s broadband service provider clients are weighing myriad technology options, including virtualized Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) and Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), as well as fiber-deep strategies that enable standards like Full Duplex DOCSIS.

In fact, as some operators look at options like fiber-deep, the prospect of taking fiber all the way to the residence comes to mind.

“A lot of the operators out there are going fiber-deep. The next transition is go FTTH. What we’re trying to say is, here’s a platform for you to bet on all those infrastructure plans,” said Asaf Matatyaou, VP of solutions and product management for Harmonic’s cable edge business.

CableOS uses a cloud-native platform to support converged DOCSIS CMTS and FTTH Passive Optional Network (PON) Optical Line Termination (OLT) applications, and additional containerized access applications such as DOCSIS 4.0 in the future.

The new version includes both 10G EPON and 10G XGS-PON, as is a remote CableOS OLT module that has the same footprint as Harmonic’s Pebble Remote PHY device. Through a single CableOS instance running in a centralized data center, operators can simultaneously deliver Remote PHY DOCSIS and Remote OLT FTTH services, dramatically simplifying the operational complexity of managing and scaling multiple broadband access applications.

Harmonic last week announced that South Carolina operator Comporium will use CableOS in a new DAA configuration. Over the summer, the tech vendor announced a multi-year, $175 million deal with Comcast for the solution, as well as a separate $55 million arrangement with a European client widely believed to be Liberty Global. 

Making its first appearance at Cable-Tec Expo Show following its purchase of Arris earlier this year CommScope will present three technologies it believes will provide clarity for cable engineers to finally make some forward-looking decisions about their networks ... and start rendering some product orders.

Extended Soft Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) blends elements of Full Duplex DOCSIS and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, two technologies cooked up by CableLabs to extend the life of hybrid fiber coaxial networks into the next two decades. 

In fact, Chris Busch, CommScope engineering fellow in the office of the CTO, calls Extended Soft FDD “the union of the two technologies,” allowing operators to adjust allocation of bandwidth across the upstream and downstream channels.

Full Duplex DOCSIS has the capability of delivering symmetrical 10 Gbps speeds. But its uptake has been limited by what are perceived to be some inflexible factors.

“If we’re going to make Full Duplex work for us as industry, we need to have ability to use spectrum in many different use cases,” Busch said.

He added that unlike FDX, CommScope’s trials of Extended Soft FDD have revealed no rigid need for a node plus zero network configuration.

“A lot of Extended Soft FDD is amplifier friendly,” Busch said. “It’s a boon to the operator.”

CommScope will make its pitch next week amid a slow sales year for cable access technology vendors in general.

Also speaking to MCN Monday, Todd Kessler, senior VP of product management for CommScope, noted that the shift from centralized integrated CCAP architecture to Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) is one of the biggest technological changes the cable industry has ever made. He believes CTOs will continue to mull these decisions through the calendar year.

To hopefully move the market along, CommScope will also present what it calls DAA Aggregator, a product that lets operators connect up to eight HFC nodes to one Remote PHY device. This significantly increases the number of homes passed per RPD serving group—from 20 to 40 to between 150 to 300—enabling deeper reach into neighborhoods and a simplified path to network upgrades.

Also being demonstrated: DOCSIS Timing Protocol uses precise timing distribution over the DOCSIS networks for time-critical processing and applications, where a fraction of a second means the difference between success and failure. Current and future applications include mobile backhaul, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicle control.

“This is all built around driving the cable operators to better utilize their HFC plant, and breath new life into HFC architecture, taking fiber deeper, and adding to the technology,” Kessler said. 

In keeping in with a recent cable industry trend for business conference, the SCTE looked outside the cable industry for its 2019 Cable-Ten Expo keynote, enlisting Preetha Vijayakumar, VP of enterprise network and communications services for FedEx.

According to the Society of Cable Technology Engineers, in a session titled “Delivering the Future,” Vijayakumar’s “customer-centric insights will articulate how powerful new technologies—enabled by cable’s 10G initiative—are unlocking new opportunities for FedEx delivery systems. Vijayakumar’s operational area is responsible for optimizing capabilities of the data centers, networks and field service organizations that connect FedEx’s vast web of transportation services.”

Related: CableLabs to Launch New Tech Event, 4Front, in Denver Next June

The announcement comes as cable industry tech consortium CableLabs is reinventing its closed Summer Conference into an open June technology event that brings in technologists from a broad sector of industries, all showcasing applications for next-generation networks.

Notably, last year's Cable-Tec Expo was keynoted by Cox Communications chief Pat Esser — a pretty typical top speaker selection in prior campaigns.

“This is pretty cool stuff—not the industry talking to the industry, but more of a what-it-means discussion from the point of view of the customer,” an SCTE spokesman told MCN.

This year’s Cable-Tec Expo is set for Sept. 30 through Oct. 3 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is produced each fall by the SCTE and its sibling org, the International Society of Broadband Engineers (ISBE).

“FedEx’s keen grasp of the connective power of telecommunications has played a pivotal role as it has revolutioned essential delivery of goods,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE•ISBE. “Today’s cable technology and the transformative capabilities of our 10G networks are unparalleled in enabling high-speed, robust, low latency and highly secure communications backbones that can drive service excellence and business results for companies such as FedEx.”

The SCTE said smart cities, so-called “10G” cable network technologies and new network alignments like Distributed Access Architecture will top-line its 2019 Cable-Tec Expo conference.

Now the premiere cable industry business conference, Cable-Tec Expo is set for Sept. 30 - Oct. 3 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

Session highlights at this year’s show, according to an announcement put out today by the Society of Cable Technology Engineers, include “Mission 10G: Implementing Forward Looking Capabilities in Your Network.” Here, representatives from CableLabs, operators and vendors discuss the roadmap to deploying cable network technologies, including Full Duplex DOCSIS, that will ultimately enable 10G services.

The session is being jointly organized by SCTE, CableLabs, NCTA—the groups that launched the “10G” marketing campaign at CES earlier this year. Sponsors include CommScope, Harmonic, Intel and Vecima Networks.

Meanwhile, smart cities events will include a series of presentation on “Smart Cities Day,” October 3. These presentations at the Innovation Theater stage on the show floor will attempt to highlight how municipalities can harness the power of 10G technologies to drive economic opportunities. The event is sponsored by Charter Communications and Liberty Global, with Comcast and Cox Communications also contributing exhibits.

Discounted early-bird registration is available for Cable-Tec Expo.