Tech vendor CommScope said Thursday that it's close to developing hardware and software that supports both flavors of the cable industry's new DOCSIS 4.0 network standard. 

Chuck Treadway, chairman and CEO of the struggling Claremont, N.C. company, told equity analysts during CommScope's Q2 earnings report that his engineers could have products such as amplifiers and nodes able to support both Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX) and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) by the time the annual SCTE CableTec Expo conference convenes in late September. 

DOCSIS stands for "Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications." That's a globally recognized telecommunications standard allowing for high-bandwidth data to be transferred over existing coaxial cable systems.

DOCSIS 4.0 is the next iteration of this standard, allowing cable companies to eventually deliver symmetrical internet speeds of 10 megabits per second or faster. 

However, there are two variations of the standard, both developed by industry consortium CableLabs to extend the life of hybrid fiber-coaxial cable for decades. 

Full Duplex DOCSIS has more rigid upgrade requirements, which have eased a bit as the technology has been developed. (Originally, FDX required fiber nodes to be pushed out deep into the network in a so-called "node+0" configuration.) 

But FDX is the preferred DOCSIS flavor for Comcast, which is already working with tech vendor Broadcom on cable modems, amplifiers and nodes that support both FDX and ESD. 

ESD, meanwhile, has less rigid upgrade requirements, but a lower ceiling -- its spectrum limit 1.8GHz (up from about 1.2GHz for today's DOCSIS 3.1 networks). Charter Communications and Cox Communications have been an early supporters of ESD, but they're also looking closely at FDX solutions. 

Cable network technology is now a priority for debt-strapped CommScope, which paid $45.1 million at auction in May to acquire bankrupt rival Casa Systems' cable network assets. CommScope, which is around $9 billion of debt, has also recently sold off part of its business, including its customer premises equipment division to Europe's Vantiva back in November.

CommScope said its second-quarter sales declined 12.7% to $1.38 billion. 

Indebted tech vendor CommScope has announced the sale of its Outdoor Wireless Networks (OWN) and Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) segments to Amphenol Corp. for $2.1 billion. 

Also read: CommScope Reports 38% Q4 Revenue Drop … But No Buyers To Ease Its Arduous $9 Billion Debt Load

Managing a debt load of $9 billion, much of it tied to the $7.4 billion purchase of Arris in 2019, CommScope will be able to avoid liquidation through 2025, Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold told investors. 

But it comes with a cost. 

“The cash infusion enables CommScope to meet its debt obligations through 2025,” Leopold wrote. “However, it is divesting some of its most profitable businesses and will no longer have the cash generation from the OWN and DAS assets."

In early October, CommScope sold its “Home Networks” unit, which makes “customer premises equipment” like video set-tops and gateways, to Vantiva, the French company formerly known as Technicolor. 

Also read: CommScope Tries To Race Past Bankruptcy Court

The company’s latest divestment is expected to close in the first half of 2025. 

“This transaction allows CommScope to increase focus and further strengthen its CommScope NEXT priorities with its remaining segments and business units,” CommScope CEO Chuck Treadway, said in a statement. “We believe CommScope’s OWN and DAS businesses are positioned to continue to perform well under Amphenol’s leadership.”

While CommScope seeks to raise capital through divestments, it has put money recently into its Access Networks Solutions business, outbidding Vecima Networks in May to acquire bankrupt Casa Systems’ cable tech operations for $45.1 million. 

CommScope has won the auction for bankrupt rival tech vendor Casa System's cable network assets with a surprisingly robust $45.1 million bid. 

That winning number was more than twice the $20 million “stalking horse” bid rendered back in early April by Canadian software company Vecima Networks, which moved in shortly after Casa Systems filed bankruptcy. 

Vecima, which had hoped Casa’s assets would accelerate its quest to run down Harmonic in the race for cable network virtualization, said it has assumed the role of backup bidder, with a bid of $44.95 million.

The sale of Casa’s cable tech business is part of a supervised, piece-by-piece bankruptcy court auction that has also seen Andover, Massachusetts-based Casa’s 5G mobile core and RAN assets sold to Lumine for $32.25 million, and Dallas-based DZS pay $7 million to buy NetComm, provider of fiber extension, fixed wireless access, home broadband and industrial Internet of Things products and patents.  

As for Hickory, North Carolina-based CommScope, it has battled its own debt demons in the aftermath of its $7.4 billion purchase of cable tech vendor Arris. 

However, extending itself further brings CommScope customer relationships with Casa client operators including Liberty Global, J:COM, Vodafone, and Canada's Rogers Communications and Vidéotron. 

“As a leader in the cable industry, we are quite pleased by the opportunity to acquire Casa’s cloud-native network solutions,” CommScope CEO Chuck Treadway said in a statement. “Adding Casa’s technology to our portfolio will allow us to provide a seamless transition for our combined customer base that utilizes both integrated and virtual CMTS products. This transaction provides stability to Casa’s customers while allowing CommScope to further grow our customer base as we enable customers to migrate to Distributed Access Architecture solutions on their own timeline.”

For its part, Vecima said: “the auction was a competitive daylong process that consisted of multiple rounds of bidding by Vecima and several other interested parties. Vecima conducted extensive due diligence prior to the auction and, based on those insights, made the decision at the end of the auction not to increase its bid any further when the proposed price was no longer reasonably supported by Vecima’s valuation of the assets.”

After conceding in November that CommScope could be headed for bankruptcy, the top executives for leading telecom technology vendor CommScope didn't have a cheery update for investors during their Q4 earnings call Thursday. 

Revenue slid 38.4% in the fourth quarter to $1.186 billion, while full-year sales were down 23.1% to $5.789 billion. (CommScope's earnings release can be found here.)

Business has slipped in each of CommScope's operational quadrants, the hardest hit being its biggest -- "Connectivity and Cable Solutions" revenue was down 42% to $556 million in Q4. Here's a graphical look at that bleak revenue situation from page 6 of CommScope's earnings presentation.)

Of greater disappointment to investors, however, was the fact that CommScope didn't have a buyer lined up for its Access Networks Solutions business. The Hickory, N.C.-based company is $9 billion in debt. 

In early October, it sold its “Home Networks” unit, which makes “customer premises equipment” like video set-tops and gateways, to Vantiva, the French company formerly known as Technicolor. 

CommScope needs to generate more cash to pay down its debt. But on Thursday, company CFO Kyle Lorentzen said his team has yet encounter an offer for the sector with the right "valuation" and that CommScope wasn't going to "sell its assets on the cheap."

The Access Networks Solutions operation sells technology components for cable networks, including nodes, amplifiers and cable modem termination systems. The unit experienced a 43% sales dive in 2023 to $95 million, but CommScope officials expect revenue to pick up in the back half of this year. 

Comcast is using CommScope's Full Duplex amplifier as part of its DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade.

CommScope shares started the day at $1.39 a share and ended up at $1.16 per unit. They ticked up slightly in after-hours trading. 

From pay TV set-tops to the technology that goes into the DOCSIS-powered broadband networks of cable companies, CommScope has been long been one of the telecom business' more recognizable vendors.

But with its shares down once again Tuesday — more than 5% as of midday trading on the Nasdaq — the Hickory, N.C.-based company is challenged by more than $9 billion of debt and the very real potential of winding up in bankruptcy. Much of that debt is tied to CommScope's $7.4 billion purchase of Arris back in 2019. 

After trading at over $9 a share a year ago, CommScope’s share price has dropped to below $1.80.

In early October, the company sold its “Home Networks” unit, which makes “customer premises equipment” like video set-tops and gateways, to Vantiva, the French company formerly known as Technicolor. And according to a recent Bloomberg report, CommScope is also looking to possibly sell its access networks business, which makes software and hardware for DOCSIS 4.0 networks, as well as its Ruckus outdoor wireless unit. 

With CEO Chuck Treadway declaring, “The weaker macroeconomic backdrop and customer inventory digestion continues to negatively impact revenues” during CommScope's Q3 earnings report on October 30, the company lowered its EBITDA guidance.

Late last week, CommScope shares perked up after Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold upgraded its shares to “market perform” from ”underperform.“ (This was first reported on by Light Reading.)

Leopold believes the company's balance sheet will start to look better after its currently high inventory levels stabilize. 

“We cannot rule out the risk of bankruptcy, but we believe the fundamentals have nearly bottomed and that the company can avert default,” Leopold wrote. “We consider CommScope a good company, yet it faces challenges.”

One of the biggest vendors in the telecom industry, CommScope, will sell the unit that manufactures its broadband gateways, pay TV set-tops and OTT players to France’s Vantiva, which rebranded from Technicolor last year. 

Under terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, CommScope will assume a 25% stake in Vantiva after selling its “Home Networks” unit. CommScope will also get an “earnout” of up to $100 million if Vantiva can achieve a EBITDA goal of €400 million (around $420 million) over a five-year period and meet “certain other thresholds.”

You can read CommScope’s deal announcement here. 

CommScope's Home Networks unit generated $1.5 billion in revenue in the 12 months ended June 30. CommScope reported net sales of $330 million for the division in Q2, down 22% year over year, attributing the drop to “weak demand and challenging market conditions.” 

No details were offered as to how many Home Networks employees from Hickory, North Carolina-based CommScope Vantiva might be keeping around. The unit will be combined with Vantiva’s Connected Home division, which generated annual revenue of $2.09 billion through June. 

Vantiva did report its own 10% revenue dip for Connected Home through the first half of fiscal 2023. 

CommScope had been shopping its Home Networks unit since April 2021.

“Our Home Networks business is currently in a challenging environment, and by combining these two businesses we believe it provides the best opportunity for future success,” CommScope CEO Chuck Treadway said in a statement.

“Additionally, both Home Networks and Vantiva share a similar vision, and value innovation, customer service, and developing products of the highest quality,” Treadway added. 

“This planned strategic acquisition represents a unique transformative opportunity for Vantiva,” said Luis Martinez-Amago, CEO of Vantiva. “It will enable us to reinforce Vantiva’s Connected Home operations, accelerate our innovation road map and expand into new markets through additional commercial partnerships. From a financial perspective, the acquisition of Home Networks will substantially increase the scale of our business while also generating synergies, that will significantly strengthen our free cash flow generation potential.”

Comcast said it has received prototypes of a crucial component needed for its next-generation "10G" network.

Prototypes of Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX) amplifiers from cable tech vendor CommScope will enable Comcast to build a multi-gigabit-speed network, delivering symmetrical downstream and upstream speeds, based on FDX DOCSIS 4.0 technology. 

Comcast, which is leading the cable industry's network-evolution into a catch-all marketing slogan called "10G," wants to deploy this multi-gig network across most of its footprint by 2025. Comcast's next-generation network will also be one of the first to be based on Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), which virtualizes expensive proprietary core network hardware including the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS).

The cable operator recently said it would have "foundational upgrades" completed by the end of February needed to reach 10 million customers with its shiny new FDX DOCSIS 4.0 network.

Comcast said it would begin immediately lab testing the CommScope amps, which offset a key limitation for FDX. Previous iterations of the scheme required a "node+0" configuration to avoid echo interference on non-fiber portion of the network, meaning there could be no amplifiers between the last fiber node in the network and the customer. 

This required operators to extend fiber very deep into their networks -- not quite to the home, but close enough so that the economics of keeping hybrid-fiber/coax were pretty much negated. 

Previous generation amplifiers didn't have the echo-cancellation capabilities needed for symmetrical delivery of the upstream and the downstream signals, so there couldn't be any amps between where the fiber ends and the end point of the network. 

Comcast already successfully tested a reference design of the new tech used by the CommScope amps last fall and describes it as the missing link needed to make its FDX plan work. 

 “CommScope has been a key partner in our work and deploying their FDX amplifiers across our network is a critical next step," said Elad Nafshi, executive VP and chief network officer at Comcast Cable, in a statement. "We’re excited to harden this technology and begin rolling them out across our network, so that we can continue to deliver the best connectivity experience to our customers.”

CommScope has announced a new line of carrier grade Wi-Fi gateways based on open-sourced firmware powered by the RDK and OpenWrt developer communities. 

The Hickory, N.C.-based technology company is unveiling its new devices at CES in Las Vegas this week, as headquarters still works, to try to spin off the slumping CommScope Home Networks division. 

The HomeVantage portfolio consists of gateways and modems for PON, DOCSIS, Ethernet and Wi-Fi extenders, including support for the emerging Wi-Fi 7 standard. 

 The HomeVantage portfolio is supported by CommScope Home Network’s HomeAssure service delivery platform, which can fully manage the capabilities of the broadband devices, including containerized application orchestration, Wi-Fi management and other advanced services.  With full compliance of Broadband Forum standards, HomeVantage solutions can also be supported by other service delivery platforms.

“With more than 70 million RDK devices deployed globally, service providers continue to trust CommScope Home Networks to enhance open-source platforms and develop high quality, secure solutions that improve the consumer experience,” said Ken Haase, VP of product management for CommScope's Home Networks, in a statement.  

“By broadening our portfolio to include OpenWrt and solutions in development by the prpl Foundation, the HomeVantage portfolio enables service providers to consistently deliver new, developing consumer services to the home – no matter what the access technology may be," Haase added. 

Eighteen months after it first announced plans to spin off its struggling division that makes pay TV set-top boxes and home internet gateways, telecom tech vendor CommScope said it'll remain stuck with its Home Networks unit for the foreseeable future. 

Speaking to equity analysts late last week during CommScope's third-quarter earnings report, CEO Chuck Treadway said the company will now implement a "transformation plan" for Home Networks, as the divisions remains vexed with issues ranging from a sustained global chip shortage to the negative impacts of foreign exchange rates. 

Beyond that, Home Networks has been challenged by shrinking demand for so-called "Customer Premises Equipment" (CPE), with pay TV set-top box sales declining for the better half of the last decade, and internet gateway demand starting to drop, too. 

Revenue for CommScope's Home Networks division was down 6% in Q3 to $391 million. Adjusted EBITDA did improve from a loss of $16 million a year ago to a loss of $5 million in the most recent quarter. 

Also read: Mediacom Selects CommScope as Primary Tech Vendor as It Switches Network to Distributed Access Architecture

With cable operators ramping up their network technology purchases ahead of a major upgrade cycle, net sales were up 28% in Q3 to just over $1 billion in CommScope's core business sector, "Connectivity and Cable Solutions." Adjusted EBITDA was up 55% year over year to $188 million. 

But investors reacted to the news about the Hickory, N.C.-based tech company's inability to spin off Home Networks into a stand-alone publicly traded company. (Notably, CommScope CPE rival Technicolor just spun its set-top business out into a new public offering called Vantiva.)

CommScope shares are down nearly 27% from late last week. ■

CommScope has announced a key customer win as it tries to maintain its position as the top cable technology vendor amid the cable industry’s “10G” network tech transition.

Hickory, North Carolina-based CommScope will be the primary tech vendor for the nation’s fifth-largest cable operator, Mediacom Communications, as it transitions its network to a virtualized Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) configuration.

In engineering-speak, CommScope will supply Blooming Grove, New York-based Mediacom, which serves around 1.47 million broadband customers, with its RD2322 RxD, “operating as a Remote MACPHY Device in the OM4120 Optical Node, configured with a high-split (204 MHz) upstream.”

CommScope and Mediacom have already collaborated on a successful trial in Ames, Iowa, of the vendor’s Remote PHY solutions, which featured CommScope products including the E6000 Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) Core, OM6000 node, Remote PHY Device (RPD) and Video Unified Edge (VUE).

The top cable operators, including Comcast and Charter Communications, have already begun the process of upgrading their 1 gigabit-per-second-capable DOCSIS 3.1 networks to the new Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 standard, which will provide symmetrical multi-Gbps speeds both upstream and downstream. 

Simultaneously, they’re virtualizing expensive, power-intensive proprietary cable-network hardware, migrating these devices’ functions to software running on commodity x86 servers, under the catchall heading DAA. (The cable industry has thrown both FDX DOCSIS 4.0 and DAA into an even broader bucket it calls 10G.)

Insurgent vendors including Harmonic have targeted CommScope's dominant market share in cable tech with new DAA software solutions. But the Mediacom win seems to show that CommScope is at least holding its own. Neither CommScope nor Mediacom disclosed how much money is involved in the commitment. 

“CommScope’s flexible solutions have allowed us to take advantage of our installed base of nodes, as well as the RD2322 RxD's ability to operate as a Remote MACPHY device, to make a smooth and efficient transition to our network of the future,” Mediacom chief technology officer JR Walden said in a statement. 

Added Guy Sucharczuk, senior VP and general manager of Access Network Solutions for CommScope, “This is a significant step forward for Mediacom's network, and it's a showcase for how CommScope is equipping the world’s leading operators for the 10G future.” ■

CommScope launched HomeVista on Monday at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2022 in Philadelphia, a portfolio that allows service providers using streaming technologies to simplify and accelerate the introduction of new video services.  

According to CommScope, HomeVista solutions allows service providers to deliver video services that offer streaming services and live TV with an individualized user experience, introduce streamer services to the market faster, and reduce development costs by avoiding fully customized solutions. 

HomeVista also uses open-source software like AndroidTV and RDK to deliver streaming applications that may include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, YouTube. The RDK-based HomeVista includes AppCloud from ActiveVideo, which gives operators the ability to deliver the latest OTT content and applications. 

“Our service provider customers are looking to us to offer next-generation solutions that combine top tier OTT applications with their streamed TV services to take their subscribers’ viewing experience to the next level,” CommScope Home Networks president Joe Chow in a press release. “Our HomeVista portfolio enables our service provider customers to bring streaming video services to market faster than ever before.”

HomeVista also lets service providers customize the consumer experience through the installation of their own TV app, customizable splash screen, RCU and streamer case. CommScope Home Networks Professional Services also can provide additional customization on the HomeVista platform. ■

After building its own set-tops in-house for the early deployment of its hybrid streaming/ATSC 3.0 pay TV service, Evoca TV is now working with CommScope to build a device that blends the Android TV UX with ATSC 3.0 and ATSC 1.0 tuners. 

Dubbed the Pilot, CommScope's new VIP7802-ATSC is purpose built for Evoca TV's nascent 80-linear-channel service, which combines low-bandwidth internet and ATSC 3.0 broadcast distribution. The service, which distributes the bulk of its programming data via NextGen TV signals, is designed for rural areas that might not have the bandwidth for 4K streaming. 

“Evoca TV’s Pilot provides a cost-effective way to roll out our unique Next Gen TV service to subscribers as we launch in multiple television markets,” Evoca TV President and CEO Todd Achilles said, in a statement. " This is also a significant advancement for the industry, and we intend to make a similar product available to other broadcasters.”

Also read: From Evoca to STIRR to VUit, How Broadcasters Are Tapping into ATSC 3.0

After rolling out in beta in its home market of Boise, Idaho last year, and expanding to neighboring city Twin Falls, Idaho, Evoca TV is getting ready to expand its service to Phoenix, Arizona in September. 

According to an Evoca rep, the company began a "big media push" in Boise earlier this month, where the service is currently promotionally priced at $9.50 a month, and Evoca TV has plans for expansion into three additional markets "in the pipeline. 

Evoca TV isn't revealing any subscriber data just yet. 

Evoca launched with CPE, dubbed "Scout," which it built in-house because, as Achilles explains it, the start-up "didn't have a choice."

As for CommScope, it announced plans in April to spin off its Home Networks division, which houses its ailing pay TV set-top business. Home Networks saw a 28% revenue drop to $457 million in the second quarter. 

“Leveraging CommScope’s expertise to develop the innovative VIP7802-ATSC set-top solution is enabling Evoca to offer a unique television and entertainment content offering,” said Ken Haase, VP of product management for CommScope. “Evoca will provide their [sic] subscribers with a solution that will enhance their viewing experience and will also deliver aggregated streaming content."

The global semiconductor shortage that has already roiled the automotive sector is now being broadly felt, with companies in the tech and telecom sectors reducing their guidance to investors into 2022. 

“Given the supply chain issues we face, we anticipate slightly negative player margins for Q2 and the likelihood of increasing negative player margins in the second half of 2021, given the anticipated component cost increases,” Roku CFO Steve Louden told investors last week during his company’s Q1 earnings call. 

Roku reported a 22% year over year increase in hardware revenue in Q1, to $107.7 million. 

CommScope, meanwhile, doesn’t expect a “fully normalized silicon supply environment” to return until early 2022. The company’s Home Networks unit ended the first quarter with more than $1 billion in backlog orders, which is more than twice its 2020 average. Sales for Home Networks, which makes pay TV set-top boxes and broadband gateways, fell 19% to $489 million in Q1, due in part to the supply chain-driven backlog.

“In terms of supply chain shortages, the main one that we're experiencing is in the Home business with our silicon products,” said CommScope President and CEO Charles Treadway, also in a Q1 call last week. 

“We're not immune to the global supply chain constraints,” added Patrick Harshman, CEO of Harmonic, another key tech vendor to the telecom and video industries. “We're seeing shortages of several key components and related significantly higher costs impacting most significantly our DAA and shelf hardware products.”

Harmonic still saw quarterly revenue tick up over 42% to $111.6 million.

Global semiconductor supply has failed to keep up with the demand, as all kinds of sectors now include ever greater amounts of silicon in their products. 

Last month, chipmakers including Intel, Nvidia and Taiwan’s TSMC warned their investors that semiconductor shortages could last until next year. 

And sectors like automotive have already felt the pinch. U.S. automakers General Motors and Ford said in February that the semiconductor scarcity could cut into their full-2021 earnings by as much as $2 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively.

It should be noted that the impact of this chip shortage is somewhat uneven and not universally felt right now. Take for example Los Angeles-based Xperi—the tech company servicing sectors like automotive entertainment, and which recently paid $3 billion to acquire TiVo, reported minimal supply chain effects last week during its Q1 call.

“While it will trim the overall growth number by a few percentage points, we have yet to see, at least from people we are doing more business with, an indication that it's going to materially impact our business beyond what we've already factored in and thought about in our respective guidance range,” said Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner.

CommScope said that its DAA solution incorporating both Remote PHY and Remote MAC/PHY capabilities is ready for field trials. 

The Hickory, N.C.-based technology company demonstrated the E6000n RD2322 RxD DAA solution at last fall’s Cable-Tec Expo virtual event, pitching it as a precursor to eventual  wide scale adoption of CableLabs’ DOCSIS 4.0 standard for hybrid fiber/coax networks. 

As a Remote PHY device, the RD2322 RxD enables operators to reap the benefits of DAA—namely improved headend density and power efficiency—by moving PHY layer functionality from headend or hub to the fiber optic node. 

As a Remote MAC/PHY device, the RD2322 RxD goes one step further, moving both the PHY and MAC/PHY layer functions out of the headend or hub to a fiber optic node. By using the RD2322 RxD to place the digital-to-RF interface at the optical-to-coax boundary, operators can achieve increased bandwidth capacity and improved fiber efficiencies, simplify plant operations, decrease loads on headend facility space and power systems, and align their networks with the systems of the future.

“With the device’s availability for field deployment, we’re giving operators the ability to take advantage of DAA’s benefits today, while offering unprecedented flexibility for their transition from Remote PHY to Remote MACPHY in the future,” said Morgan Kurk, senior VP and segment leader of broadband networks for CommScope, in a statement.

CommScope is moving forward with the broad-sweeping reorganization plan announced during its fourth quarter earnings report, announcing this week that it will spin off its Home Networks division, which makes pay TV set tops, routers and modems.

The Hickory, N.C.-based technology company expects the spinoff to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2022. Joe Chow, who has led the Home Networks segment since late 2019 under a senior VP title, will be the CEO of the new publicly traded company. 

“We looked at the differences between Home Networks and the rest of our segments, and those differences were pretty stark,” said CommScope CEO Jeff Treadway, speaking during a conference call with investor analysts on Thursday. “You’re looking at 10%-plus margins vs. much higher margins on the other side. And in terms of manufacturing volume, you have tens of millions of units vs. hundreds of thousands.”

Treadway also noted that manufacturing is done in-house for most of CommScope’s other divisions, while Home Networks releases on contract manufacturing. 

Notably, Home Networks—which sells modems, gateways and pay TV set tops to both operator and retail channels—saw a 31% Q4 sales decline to $571 million. Cord-cutting continues to have an impact in the pay TV sales chain beyond the operator level. 

Home Networks was one of the pieces brought into the CommScope fold with the acquisition of Arris, which was announced in October 2018 and completed in 2019.

Home Networks accounted for 28% of CommScope’s $8.4 billion in revenue in 2020. It was the company’s second biggest unit behind Broadband Networks. 

With the spinoff, CommScope will retain not only its Broadband Networks division, which supplies technology infrastructure to telecom operators all over the globe and saw sales increase by 17% to $789 million in the fourth quarter, but also its Venue and Campus Networks division, and its Outdoor Wireless Networks unit. 

Treadway described the plan as being in the “early innings,” and it could be interrupted by a variety of factors, a sale among them. 

The spinoff is the first major move under the company’s CommScope NEXT initiative, which Treadway described as a “comprehensive set of company-wide actions designed to take CommScope to the next level of profitability.”

Also included in that initiative will be a series of “cost reductions actions,” which will be announced at a later date. 

CommScope reported a 31% decline in net sales to $571 million in its Home Networks segment during the fourth quarter, as brisk movement of DOCSIS 3.1 gateways failed to offset the cratering demand for pay TV set-tops.

Overall, Q4 net sales for the Hickory, North Carolina, technology vendor dropped 7% to $2.29 billion, with the Broadband Networks business showing particular strength. Driven by the network capacity needs of its cable operator clients, Broadband Networks net sales increased 17% to $789 million in the quarter. Outdoor Wireless Networks ticked up 1% to $295 million, while the Campus and Events portfolio declined 6% to $477 million.

The conspicuous erosion in video technology sales comes at a precarious moment, with the company kicking off a new business-wide evaluation called “CommScope NEXT” under recently appointed CEO Charles Treadway. 

Also read: CommScope Pitches DAA, Virtualization at Cable-Tec Expo

Outlined in the slide below, CommScope NEXT will kick the tires on everything from head counts to business systems to product portfolios, looking for ways to streamline, cut costs and generate more net sales, more than two years after its $7.4 billion swallowing of Arris Corp.

“When you think about duplicative systems, just think about the acquisition of Arris—we've brought two very large companies together, two $5 billion plus companies. When we put those together, you find a lot of duplicative systems,” Treadway explained to investment analysts during Wednesday’s earnings call. 

“A great example is what we have in the IT side,” he added. “One company runs Oracle, and one company runs SAP. As we move to one system, we're going to have significant savings from that.”

CommScope is trying to offset the decline in full-featured DVR set-tops with OTT-centric devices. But the longer term trend lines don’t look nearly as attractive as the ongoing “dance” the company says it’s involved in with cable operators over broadband network capacity.

“They come back to us when they need more capacity in their network,” said Morgan Kurk, executive VP, CTO and segment leader of CommScope’s Broadband Networks unit, describing the interaction Wednesday.

“They buy physical cards, and then they add additional capacity to those cards in effect,” Kurk added. “It's a software related capacity add over time, and they do that until they exhaust the amount of bandwidth that's available to them. So, it is an opportunity to continue to sell additional licenses to them until they reach a certain point and then they go back to buying hardware to increase that available capacity again. That's the dance that's going on. Of course, there is also the upgrade to the network, whether it is to go to DOCSIS 4.0 which expands the amount of spectrum available and thus the amount of both hardware and software that they can buy from us. And also, the change in architecture from the centralized CCAP to distributed access architecture, whether it's Remote MAC or Remote PHY. This puts more of this equipment out toward the edge of the network to reduce some costs in the headend and to increase the capacity of the backhaul network and to reduce latency. So, all of those things will be going on for the next decade.”

The bandwidth demands of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed cable networks to the edge, and forced forward-looking plans to transition networks into modern paradigms including network function virtualization (NFV) and distributed access architecture (DAA) to the back burner. 

But as a flurry of announcements from the recently wrapped virtual iteration of the SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo conference revealed, business for the hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) network technologies of the future is finally starting to heat up. 

CommScope, for instance, which had previously announced remote PHY deployments with Danish operator Stofa, touted new DAA customer wins with Germany’s Tele Columbus AG and Hungary’s Vidanet. 

At the Expo, midsized cable operator Mediacom Communications presented at the “10G” DAA network trial, featuring core CommScope tech. Even bigger, the vendor announced that Comcast is actually deploying its E6000r High Density Remote PHY Shelf in its ongoing DAA rollout. 

Comcast has deployed the virtual converged cable access platform (vCAAP) in select portions of its national network, leveraging Harmonic’s CableOS software virtualization solution. And earlier this month, the top U.S. cable company announced a Florida trial involving a live network built on full virtualization and DAA using Remote PHY, delivering symmetrical 1.25 gigabits-per-second service to a Florida residence.

Ripple+ Makes Waves

Harmonic also used the forum of Cable-Tec to tout ongoing involvement with Comcast’s Florida trial. The San Jose, California-based tech vendor said Comcast is the first operator to trial its Ripple+, a new component in CableOS that promises to deliver gigabit-level upstream speeds for operators.

“Upstream bandwidth demand continues to intensify as more people work from home and participate in distance learning,” said Nimrod Ben-Natan, senior VP and general manager of cable access business at Harmonic. “Leveraging our latest CableOS cloud-native and distributed network edge platforms, the cable industry now has the tools to meet growing bandwidth demand and offer market-leading symmetric gigabit services today, without costly cable-modem or set-top-box replacement.”

Harmonic said it added 11 new CableOS customer deployments in 2020, including DNA in Finland, Canada’s Access Communications and Seaside Communications and a leading operator in Asia. Including its multiyear, $175 million deal with Comcast to deploy CableOS in the United States, Harmonic now counts 38 customers for the virtualized solution. 

Going into Cable-Tec Expo in 2019, NFV and DAA business was also slow, with operators waiting to get clarity on their future network needs and holding off for the resolution of conflicting product development paths, such as Full Duplex DOCSIS versus low latency DOCSIS. 

The publishing by industry consortium CableLabs of the broad, umbrella-like DOCSIS 4.0 standard harmonized the road leading forward for HFC networks. But the COVID-19 pandemic, which diverted CTOs’ thoughts to the immediate, triage-like need for additional capacity within existing DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1 networks, once again sidetracked the DAA discussion.

Research company Dell’Oro Group, which tracks the cable access technology business, said vendor revenue was down 8% to $219 million in the second quarter. But that trend line could soon change. 

Steady Virtual Shift

“We continue to see a steady shift among major cable operators towards virtual CCAP and DAA deployments,” Jeff Heynen, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, said. “The combination of virtualization and DAA give operators the ability to scale more easily and have far more flexibility in how they design their networks and deliver services in the future.”

It’s hard to tell if the anecdotal appearance of increased DAA ordering will translate into Q3 and Q4 cable access equipment revenue growth. But Expo activity indicated the technology is clearly evolving fast. Vendors, including CommScope, are quickly stepping up the promotion of remote MACPHY products. 

Meanwhile, British Columbia-based tech company Vecima Networks and U.K.-based Technetix announced a partnership they say will create a more flexible, easy path for operators to deploy DAA. Essentially, Vecima remote PHY devices can now connect to Technetix’s DBx modules, which can act as either amplifiers or nodes. 

“Regional variations on form factor and technical features require a very flexible approach to avoid forklift upgrades,” Vecima CEO Sumit Kumar said. “Asking service providers to replace all of their non-DAA nodes with new DAA units isn’t always feasible. Open, mixed-technology networks are, and should be, the expected network architecture to promote the adoption of technology breakthroughs like ours, and make DAA a reality.”

CommScope announced Tuesday that Comcast is deploying its E6000r High Density Remote PHY Shelf in its ongoing rollout of Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) network infrastructure.

Comcast has deployed virtual converged cable access platform in select portions of its national network, leveraging Harmonic’s CableOS virtualization solution. And just last week, the top U.S. cable company announced a Florida trial involving a live network built on full network function virtualization and DAA using Remote PHY.

For its part, CommScope has been using this week’s virtual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo conference to introduce its new Remote MACPHY technology. But it’s also seeing some market traction for the Remote PHY tech it rolled out last year. 

“Comcast’s Remote PHY Shelf deployment marks an important step in the evolution of our nation’s HFC networks,” said Kevin Keefe, CommScope senior VP and segment leader for broadband networks, in a statement. 

Added Elad Nafshi, senior VP of next-generation access networks at Comcast: “As we continue to evolve our DAA model and further virtualize our network, it’s important to have trusted partners and solutions to ensure that the process is reliable and seamless.”

The migration of hybrid fiber-coax networks to broadly virtualized design with Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) was a technology theme at last year’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans.

Twelve months later, nine of those spent in the triage setting of a pandemic, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers is hosting a virtualized version of its signature Expo event (unfurling Oct. 12-15 on a computer monitor near you). And cable technology vendors are experiencing their own kind of pandemic-related Groundhog Day, with their operator clients sidetracked from new tech to focus on the short-term, emergency issues of network capacity expansion to serve customers working their jobs and attending school from home.

That heavenly “10G” future everyone was dreaming about in 2019? Well, that just had to wait. 

“Deployment of virtualized technology did slow down over the last nine months,” conceded Kevin Keefe, senior VP and segment leader of broadband networks for CommScope. “To say that everyone put things on hold is maybe too strong. But operators did shift their focus to the here and now, trying to get as much bandwidth as they could really quickly. The focus has been on bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.”

Node splits and network frequency increases have enabled operators in most cases to generate enough bandwidth to meet increased customer demand for upstream capacity for years to come. 

But there still is the call of the 10G directive — to meet the speed and latency benchmarks of the wireless industry’s 5G push. And as far as bandwidth goes, the pandemic did show everyone how fast the bar can move.

“Networks didn’t break” amid the pileup of Zoom meetings, online schooling and boffo Netflix usage, Keefe said. “But they were strained a lot.”

As a result, operators are thinking about the future of their plants. But vendors like CommScope are essentially delivering, in a number of cases, the same message as they did in person last year in New Orleans, only this time through computer screens. 

“It’s virtualization squared,” quipped Keefe, who tallies participation for CommScope in 17 different Cable-Tec Expo Zoom and Webex panels, as well as various virtual booth tours and one-on-ones with members of the tech trade press. 

Focus on MACPHY

The cable business’s premiere technology event, Cable-Tec Expo was heavy last year on discussion of the virtualized converged modem termination system (CMTS), as well as pushing the “PHY” layer (an abbreviation for a “physical layer” electronic circuit) out into the network (aka Remote PHY). 

Virtualization will once again be front-and-center at the virtual Expo. Look for that discussion to broaden. 

“People tend to view that virtualization is just about the CMTS, but that actually undersells virtualization,” Keefe said. “The reality is that we’re virtualizing everything in the network.”

This year, Expo attendees will look at products currently in trials — or emerging from testing — that deploy MACPHY, which moves both the PHY and DOCSIS processing (MAC) to the access node. This means that even more network functions are pushed out closer to the customers. 

“Now, Remote MACPHY is ready to go into testing and trials,” Keefe said. “It’s opened up the technology window a little more. There are some other options.” 

Among the new products being showcased by CommScope this week will be the E6000n RD2322 RxD DAA solution, which can operate in both Remote PHY and Remote MACPHY configurations, allowing operators to choose either architecture and enabling those who deploy in Remote PHY to make a transition to Remote MACPHY via software and configuration changes. 

“With this solution, I can put the MAC layer wherever I want to,” Keefe, who describes the varying industry allegiances to Remote PHY and Remote MACPHY as a “religious war,” told Multichannel News.

“I believe Remote MACPHY is the future,” he added.

With industry engineering consortium CableLabs signing off on the broad umbrella specification of DOCSIS 4.0, next-generation DOCSIS technologies will also be a major focus at Expo.

One such innovation is Low Latency DOCSIS, which is actually provisioned for in the current DOCSIS 3.1 standard. 

With the cable industry beginning to face competition from the wireless industry’s fixed 5G push, CommScope will also be presenting plenty of data on Low Latency DOCSIS. 

“The next big thing everyone is going to be focused on is latency,” Keefe said, referencing a future that’s already started, in which wireless operators tout the ultra low latencies of their 5G networks. “And it’s backloaded into DOCSIS 3.1.”

CommScope announced that veteran global technology executive Charles “Chuck” Treadway will step in as its new CEO, replacing Eddie Edwards, who had held the role the past 15 years. 

Treadway, a Harvard MBA also named to the CommScope board of directors, most recently served as chief executive for Accudyne Industries, a maker of airflow systems for industrial compressors. Accudyne is backed by The Carlyle Group, which also invests in CommScope. 

In fact, Treadway has worked for several Carlyle-backed companies. And in a note to investors sent Thursday, Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold suggested it's this Carlyle connection that's at the heart of CommScope's CEO swap.

Carlyle took CommScope public in 2013 and still owns 15.5% of the company. As part of that IPO, Carlyle--which still owns 15.5% of CommScope--agreed to a "standstill" until April 2022, at which time it can re-acquire CommScope and take it private again. 

"We suspect Carlyle has left fingerprints," wrote Leopold, who also noted CommScope Chairman Bud Watts' role as a Carlyle consultant.

For his part, Watts said it's Treadway's experience navigating economic regions like China amid a precarious global tech market that's at the heart of the exec swap. 

“Chuck is a tested and proven leader who brings extensive global business experience and strong strategic, operational, and go-to-market acumen to CommScope,” Watts said in a statement. “This is a critical time in the company’s history. Never has the need for advanced, reliable network infrastructure been more vital to consumers and businesses, nor offered CommScope greater potential opportunities for growth. Chuck has a growth mindset and an impressive record of generating above-market revenue performance and market share gains. We believe Chuck is uniquely qualified to lead CommScope in fulfilling its full strategic potential."

Edwards departs as CommScope continues to traverse the uncertain global economic waters of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only is CommScope seeking a foothold in fast-emerging technologies like 5G and CBRS, it is still digesting its $7.4 billion acquisition of Arris, it's battling to maintain its entrenched position in pay TV set-tops amid rapid evolution of the video business 

 “It has been my great privilege to serve as CommScope’s CEO and to work with such an incredibly talented team to advance our mission of serving customers in developing the most advanced networks in the world," Edwards said in a statement. "As a team, we have transformed the company from a structured cable and connectivity business to an industry-leading provider in virtually all aspects of telecommunications and broadband networks. I expect the Company will continue to advance under Chuck’s leadership, and I look forward to the Company’s future successes.”

Added Treadway: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of reliable network connectivity, and the need for products and services that will continue to push the boundaries of reliability, efficiency and collaboration for customers around the world. I look forward to working alongside the entire CommScope team to drive growth, operational excellence, and value for all our stakeholders.”

CommScope also announced that company founder Frank Drendel "in recognition of his unique status and distinguished service" has been named Chairman Emeritus.  Drendel founded CommScope in 1976 and has served continuously as its CEO and/or chairman since.

Liberty Global has introduced in Poland a new proprietary pay TV set-top that it says reduces energy use by 77% over its previous generation set-tops.

The London-based telecom also said that 35% less plastic is being used to manufacture the 4K Mini TV Box, which was designed in-house by Liberty and made by CommScope.

Liberty Global said the device is initially being deployed to its UPC Poland customers. It will be expanded to other Liberty customers in Europe “in due course,” the cable operator added. 

Of course, the pay TV business has been moving away from full-featured, DVR-centric, power-hungry set-tops for several years. So Liberty Global wants to exploit this natural migration away from devices that use as much energy in a year as a refrigerator for some good green-energy PR? Why not?

The 4K Mini TV Box supports Dolby audio and connects to its IP-based video sources via WiFi or wired Ethernet cable. It can be powered by a display’s USB input, negating the need to connect the box close to a power outlet. 

The device is controlled by a Bluetooth-enabled voice remote. 

“At UPC Poland, customer satisfaction is paramount to us, so we are committed to delivering outstanding customer care combined with best in-class connectivity and entertainment, anytime and anywhere,” Robert Redeleanu, CEO Liberty Global, Eastern Europe, said in a statement. “I am thrilled that Poland is the first country within Liberty Global to launch the new 4K Mini TV Box, and confident it will help us further enhance our unique customer experience. As we bring new innovations to our millions of customers and new premises, we are well on top of the convergence game in the market.”

Hickory, N.C.-based technology vendor CommScope reported an 18.1% year-over-year revenue dip to $2.103 billion in the second quarter, with clients in multiple parts of its business affected by the ongoing pandemic. 

The news in the company’s Broadband Networks sector was the best, with the area largely flat (off just 0.2%) year over year to $671.9 million, as cable operator clients gobbled up additional licenses to conduct network capacity expansions. CommScope said its Broadband Networks sector will benefit starting next year from tier 2 and 3 operator clients participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. 

CommScope Q2 sales were hit hard elsewhere.

In Home Networks, sales were off 31.6% to $624 million, with the video CPE market continuing to fade fast amid the cord-cutting trend, and a COVID-19-caused slump in activations only exacerbating that downward trend. 

Q2 sales in the company’s Outdoor Networks sector were down 28.3 to $328.4, with tier 1 carrier sales in North America soft due to capital spending priorities and project timing. CommScope did say that T-Mobile, which finally closed its merger with Sprint in the second quarter, has resumed spending. 

CommScope’s Venue and Campus Networks sector was off 13.2% to $478.5, with the business segment suffering from pandemic-caused general construction delays. The company did say that project cancellations have been limited. 

Hickory, N.C.-based technology vendor CommScope reported an 18.1% year-over-year revenue dip to $2.103 billion in the second quarter, with clients in multiple parts of its business affected by the ongoing pandemic.

The news in the company’s Broadband Networks sector was the best, with the area largely flat (off just 0.2%) year over year to $671.9 million, as cable operator clients gobbled up additional licenses to conduct network capacity expansions. CommScope said its Broadband Networks sector will benefit starting next year from tier 2 and 3 operator clients participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

CommScope Q2 sales were hit hard elsewhere.

In Home Networks, sales were off 31.6% to $624 million, with the video CPE market continuing to fade fast amid the cord-cutting trend, and a COVID-19-caused slump in activations only exacerbating that downward trend.

Q2 sales in the company’s Outdoor Networks sector were down 28.3 to $328.4, with tier 1 carrier sales in North America soft due to capital spending priorities and project timing. CommScope did say that T-Mobile, which finally closed its merger with Sprint in the second quarter, has resumed spending.

CommScope’s Venue and Campus Networks sector was off 13.2% to $478.5, with the business segment suffering from pandemic-caused general construction delays. The company did say that project cancellations have been limited. 

TiVo announced that it has extended, and expanded, its patent licensing deal with CommScope. 

CommScope, which purchased Arris in 2018 for $7.4 billion, is one of the largest suppliers of set-top boxes to the pay TV industry. Xperi Holdings just purchased TiVo Corp. for $1.1 billion and now controls more than 11,000 global patents through its Tessera and TiVo subsidiaries

Also read: Ex-TiVo Lawyer Patel Joins ‘Ultimate Patent Troll’

“CommScope is a leader in communications technology, and we are excited to build on our existing relationship with them as they continue to innovate across set-top platforms and video delivery devices. The licenses provided under our expanded agreement will enable CommScope to continue creating and delivering the very best experience for their customers,” said Samir Armaly, president of intellectual property at Xperi.

Armaly emergence into TiVo’s top IP licensing role comes following the departure of Arvin Patel, formerly executive VP and chief intellectual property officer for TiVo, who left via golden parachute last month following closure of the Xperi merger. Patel now works for Intellectual Ventures, the largest patent holder—and litigator—in the tech biz, controlling more than 30,000 patents. 

Also notable: CommScope, a supplier to Comcast, is named in numerous lawsuits that make up TiVo/Xperi’s sprawling patent war with the No. 1 U.S. cable operator. 

After trickling out a handful of modems and WiFi access points built around the new WiFi 6 standard last year, CommScope Tuesday announced six new WiFi 6 access points carrying its Ruckus brand.

"We've been shipping Wi-Fi 6 for almost two years, but with this announcement, we are taking the technology mainstream,” Bart Giordano, senior VP of product management for CommScope’s Ruckus portfolio, told CRN. "We're addressing a broad swath of the market now."

Also read: Unto This 10G and 5G World Comes WiFi 6

Developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the new 802.11ax standard, what we call WiFi 6, is an improvement on the fifth-generation 802.11ac standard. WiFi 6 backers say the technology doesn’t just improve speed and latency, enabling users to fully realize the multi-Gigabit speeds of their future network connections. WiFi 6 is also a major advancement in how data is distributed in the home, enabling routers to handle more devices at once, more efficiently.

The new Ruckus WiFi 6 portfolio includes the following:

> R850: WiFi 6 8x8:8 indoor access point with 5.9 Gbps speeds and embedded IoT.

> R750: WiFi 6 4x4:4 indoor access point with 3.5 Gbps speeds and embedded IoT.

> R650: WiFi 6 4x4:4 indoor access point with 3 Gbps speeds and embedded IoT. This addition upgrades the popular R600 series to include WiFi 6.

>R550: WiFi 6 2x2:2 indoor access point with 1.8 Gbps speeds and embedded IoT.

>T750: WiFi 6 4x4:4 outdoor access point with 3.5 Gbps speeds and embedded IoT. CommScope says it’s the industry’s first outdoor Wi-Fi 6 Certified AP

>T750SE: a WiFi 6 4x4:4 outdoor access point with 3.5 Gbps speeds, embedded IoT, and sectorized antennas. The T750SE delivers bandwidth to seating in stadiums and other large venues.

The R650 and T750 began shipping in Q1 2020, while the R550 and R850 will begin shipping in Q2 2020. The T750SE will begin shipping in Q3 2020.

CommScope is still bullish on virtualized Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), DOCSIS 4.0, and the rest of the fancy new tech being built for cable's hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network of the future. But just like everyone else in this crazy pandemic era, it's just going to have to wait.

The technology vendor reported a 32% sales decline for its Network & Cloud unit to $366 million, with cable operator clients holding off on major virtualization/DAA investments to their networks, in favor of node splits and other short-term solutions that are helping them get through the current spike in broadband usage wrought by pandemic-era sheltering in place mandates.

Speaking to MCN just before CommScope’s May 7 earnings call, Tom Cloonan, the company’s broadband networks CTO, said operator clients are engaged in activities such as node splits and adding additional channels to already purchased Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) hardware, activities that generate smaller sales of additional software licenses.

After Network & Cloud sales “bottomed out” in 2019, CommScope had expected to see the beginnings of a rebound in Q1. But as with everything else, the pandemic has changed everything.

“With underlying consumer bandwidth demand continuing to grow, coupled with our investments in virtualized and distributed access architecture platforms, we remain in a strong position to guide operators through the 10G network infrastructure investments that they will deploy within the coming decade,” CommScope CFO Alexander Pease told investors.

Overall, CommScope saw net sales decline 18% to $2.03 billion. 

Seemingly aware that self back-patting doesn’t present great optics right now, cable network operators and their associated vendors are at least indulging in well-earned sighs of relief.

With NCTA–The Internet & Television Association showing an aggregate traffic increase of 16% for downstream data and 34% for upstream, cable operators — which collectively control two-thirds of U.S. wireline broadband connections — are seeing the sharp usage increases on their networks during the COVID-19 pandemic hit a plateau, with few instances of major outage or service interruption.

“They probably should pat themselves on the back,” said CommScope Broadband Networks chief technology officer Tom Cloonan. “Their networks have helped hold society together at a crucial time.”

Speaking during a virtual panel event on April 28 conducted by Cisco, Cox Communications chief technology officer Kevin Hart conceded, “It’s been a mad dash over the last few months, but our networks have held up well.”

From virtually every point on the cable engineering spectrum, the message has been similar. Operators have designed their networks anticipating usage patterns 12 to 18 months in advance, with plenty of headroom built in.

In some cases, though, the margin of error hasn’t been all that thick.

Built to Survive

Hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network engineers have managed to “survive” a harrowing two months in which their networks — particularly on the upstream end, with suddenly house-bound residential customers engaged in vastly greater video-conferencing activity — “close to running out of stream,” Cloonan said.

CommScope, he said, has kept up a steady dialogue with engineers working for its operator clients, teaching them how to remotely fine-tune complicated configuration settings that had been merely adjusted to an “OK” performance level in the aftermath of the industry conversion to DOCSIS 3.1. (It’s akin to learning how to fine-tune the picture settings on your flat screen two years after taking the thing out of the box.)

This includes turning on additional channels at the cable modem termination system (CMTS) level, even those that had been in noisy “keep out” regions of the plant spectrum. They also include adjusting the buffer control settings on user modems.

“Operators have been calling us, looking for things they can do in the near term, remotely from a PC on a software level,” Cloonan said. “There have been a lot of phone calls covering a lot of topics over the last seven weeks. There are a few knobs you can turn and a few tricks you can perform. We’re all trying to squeeze every megabit out of the box we can right now.”

Beyond conducting fine-tune optimization initiatives, operators are beginning more aggressive node optimization projects that involve truck rolls and, perhaps, a bit more risk to staff.

Operators, Cloonan said, have been “kind of awakened” during the pandemic that while they’ve managed to pull through, their plants lack “infinite resources.” That has inspired some engineering teams, for example, to upgrade the upstream signals from their plants to 85 Megahertz from 42 MHz.

Hart said that “99%” of Cox’s network nodes “are in a healthy state.” But Cox did physically address “those having a problem with things like taking fiber deeper and doing node splits.”

Comcast, meanwhile, has been “running additional fiber and optical nodes” to “give us more headroom,” the company’s top technologist, Tony Werner, told reporters during a recent briefing. That work, Werner said, was in addition to a significant increase in the amount of remote “dial turns” conducted by Comcast engineers to the network.

Cloonan noted: “Every time you do a node split, you reduce the number of subscribers who have to share bandwidth. And I think we’ll be seeing a lot more note splits in the coming months. But this is something your techs can’t do from their homes. You have to roll trucks.”

Tomorrow’s Network, Today

Moderating the virtual panel presentation, Jonathan Davis, senior VP and GM of mass-scale infrastructure for Cisco, said, “As a result of COVID-19, we’re getting a glimpse of what the future of the internet is today.”

Most folks in the cable technology business seem to agree that, regardless of whether or not efforts are successful in tamping down COVID-19 and people return to their offices anytime soon, network usage will probably never again go down to February 2020 levels.

So assuming that — save for a few tweaks — the HFC network of today has proven up to the task of handling the worst crisis so far of the 21st century, will cable operators hold off on making major investments into new network technology?

The first very early indicator suggests the answer is … maybe. Harmonic just reported decelerating deployments in the first quarter for its disruptive converged cable access platform (CCAP) virtualization software, CableOS, with commercial deployments slowing to 17%.

Cloonan, though, believes the pandemic will only inspire operators to prioritize movements toward new technologies that include not just virtualization but also Extended Spectrum DOCSIS and Full Duplex DOCSIS, both of which are included in CableLabs recently published DOCSIS 4.0 specification.

“Every operator will look at what has happened and make a decision on how to analyze it and view,” Cloonan said. “But most will realize that they snuck through. Barely.” 

CommScope has laid off approximately 160 employees across its Home Networks division, as sales of one of the unit’s primary products, pay TV set-tops, decline.

Chatter among current and former CommScope employees on TheLayoff indicates that CommScope’s entire video customer premises equipment (CPE) staff based Horsham, Pennsylvania has been let go. Layoffs among CommScope Home Networks employees in San Diego have also occurred, according to message board postings.

"CommScope continuously monitors evolving marketplace conditions as a matter of business practice,” the Hickory, N.C.-based CommScope said in a statement emailed to MCN Tuesday. “We review our entire business to make our organization lean and agile, and to leverage global growth opportunities. Across the industry, there has been a significant decline in service provider investment in video programs, as the result of continued reduction in PayTV subscriptions, increased competition from over-the-top services, and the transition to lower-cost video devices.”

CommScope, Technicolor and other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) servicing the pay TV set-top business are under pressure from video cord cutting affecting their cable, satellite and telco operator clients. These customers lost more than 5 million linear TV subscribers in 2019.

Concurrently, the days of the multi-tuner, multi-gigabyte DVR set-top are on the wane.

With what remains of their video businesses, CommScope’s operator clients are moving to OTT-centric models that utilize, in many cases, consumer grade video streaming devices such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Proprietary set-tops, meanwhile, have in other instances been reduced to thin-client devices running Android TV middleware.

CommScope got into the video CPE business in 2018 with its $7.4 billion purchase of Arris.

“Home network space is a significant challenge this year as operators and carriers continue to deal with material subscriber losses,” noted CommScope CFO Alexander Pease in February, projecting a 20% sales decline for Home Networks sales in 2020.

“We are taking steps to reduce our current workforce in our Home Networks segment to instill greater efficiency, cost-competitiveness and focused innovation in areas with long-term growth opportunity,” CommScope added in its statement. "We plan to lead in the transformation of the digitally connected home, leveraging our core skills in systems, software, and hardware to create and connect a device ecosystem that enables new services and solutions, transformational consumer experiences, and profitable new business models. We are committed to positioning Home Networks to be a healthy, competitive business moving forward."

CommScope has laid off approximately 160 employees across its Home Networks division, as sales of one of the unit’s primary products, pay TV set-tops, decline. 

Chatter among current and former CommScope employees on TheLayoff indicates that CommScope’s entire video customer premises equipment (CPE) staff based Horsham, Pennsylvania has been let go. Layoffs among CommScope Home Networks employees in San Diego have also occurred, according to message board postings. 

"CommScope continuously monitors evolving marketplace conditions as a matter of business practice,” the Hickory, N.C.-based CommScope said in a statement emailed to Next TV Tuesday. “We review our entire business to make our organization lean and agile, and to leverage global growth opportunities. Across the industry, there has been a significant decline in service provider investment in video programs, as the result of continued reduction in PayTV subscriptions, increased competition from over-the-top services, and the transition to lower-cost video devices.

CommScope, Technicolor and other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) servicing the pay TV set-top business are under pressure from video cord cutting affecting their cable, satellite and telco operator clients. These customers lost more than 5 million linear TV subscribers in 2019.

Concurrently, the days of the multi-tuner, multi-gigabyte DVR set-top are on the wane.

With what remains of their video businesses, CommScope’s operator clients are moving to OTT-centric models that utilize, in many cases, consumer grade video streaming devices such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Proprietary set-tops, meanwhile, have in other instances been reduced to thin-client devices running Android TV middleware. 

CommScope got into the video CPE business in 2018 with its $7.4 billion purchase of Arris. 

“Home network space is a significant challenge this year as operators and carriers continue to deal with material subscriber losses,” noted CommScope CFO Alexander Pease in February, projecting a 20% sales decline for Home Networks sales in 2020. 

“We are taking steps to reduce our current workforce in our Home Networks segment to instill greater efficiency, cost-competitiveness and focused innovation in areas with long-term growth opportunity,” CommScope added in its statement. "We plan to lead in the transformation of the digitally connected home, leveraging our core skills in systems, software, and hardware to create and connect a device ecosystem that enables new services and solutions, transformational consumer experiences, and profitable new business models. We are committed to positioning Home Networks to be a healthy, competitive business moving forward."

After watching its network and cloud business slump every quarter since it paid $7.4 billion to acquire leading cable technology vendor Arris a year ago, CommScope declared that it can only get better from here. 

Late last week, the Hickory, N.C. company reported a 32% fourth-quarter slide in network and cloud sales to $366 million. Cable operators, still reaping the benefits of DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades and figuring out how to approach transformative new schemes such as Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), still aren’t spending on infrastructure like they were a few years ago. 

CommScope told its investors that will change in 2020. 

“We remain confident that network and sales bottomed in 2019,” said CommScope CFO Alexander Pease, speaking to investors during his company’s Q4 earrings call. “With underlying consumer bandwidth demand continuing to grow, coupled with our investments in virtualized and distributed access architecture platforms, we remain in a strong position to guide operators through the 10G network infrastructure investments that they will deploy within the coming decade.”

Also read: Harmonic Adds Two More Tier 1 Clients for CableOS

The perennial leader in technologies such as Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), CommScope suddenly finds itself in the position of playing catchup with Harmonic, which has jumped out to an early lead in the emerging era of network virtualization and DAA

CommScope CEO Marvin Edwards assured investors that CommScope is moving forward in regard to these innovations. 

“We completed a major release of our vehicle of virtual CMTS product, which will prepare us for operator deployments in early 2020,” Edwards said. “We also completed deployment and development of our remote PHY shelf product, which enables operators to place multiple RPD modules in a single chassis for data distribution from remote hubs.”

Overall, combined company net sales for CommScope declined 19% in the fourth quarter, as other sectors besides network and cloud slumped for the company, too. 

Customer Premises Equipment declined 25% to $824 million in Q4, for example, while mobility sales were off 6% to $366 million. 

For the year, net sales for the combined CommScope declined 13.8% to $9.76 billion. 

After watching its network and cloud business slump every quarter since it paid $7.4 billion to acquire leading cable technology vendor Arris a year ago, CommScope declared that it can only get better from here.

Late last week, the Hickory, N.C. company reported a 32% fourth-quarter slide in network and cloud sales to $366 million. Cable operators, still reaping the benefits of DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades and figuring out how to approach transformative new schemes such as Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), still aren’t spending on infrastructure like they were a few years ago.

CommScope told its investors that will change in 2020.

“We remain confident that network and sales bottomed in 2019,” said CommScope CFO Alexander Pease, speaking to investors during his company’s Q4 earrings call. “With underlying consumer bandwidth demand continuing to grow, coupled with our investments in virtualized and distributed access architecture platforms, we remain in a strong position to guide operators through the 10G network infrastructure investments that they will deploy within the coming decade.”

Also read: Harmonic Adds Two More Tier 1 Clients for CableOS

The perennial leader in technologies such as Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), CommScope suddenly finds itself in the position of playing catchup with Harmonic, which has jumped out to an early lead in the emerging era of network virtualization and DAA

CommScope CEO Marvin Edwards assured investors that CommScope is moving forward in regard to these innovations.

“We completed a major release of our vehicle of virtual CMTS product, which will prepare us for operator deployments in early 2020,” Edwards said. “We also completed deployment and development of our remote PHY shelf product, which enables operators to place multiple RPD modules in a single chassis for data distribution from remote hubs.”

Overall, combined company net sales for CommScope declined 19% in the fourth quarter, as other sectors besides network and cloud slumped for the company, too.

Customer Premises Equipment declined 25% to $824 million in Q4, for example, while mobility sales were off 6% to $366 million.

For the year, net sales for the combined CommScope declined 13.8% to $9.76 billion. 

The cable access technology business’s new, virtualized era has arrived for vendor Harmonic, which reported a 78% year-over-year spike in its fourth-quarter cable access revenue, to $43 million, driven by its CableOS software product.

San Jose-based Harmonic also touted two new but unspecified Tier 1 cable operator clients for CableOS, which converts the formerly hardware-intensive converged cable access platform (CCAP) of the typical cable hybrid fiber coaxial network into a virtualized software-based architecture.

CommScope, which acquired Arris last year, Cisco Systems and Casa Systems, respectively, led the old paradigm of supplying CCAP and cable modem termination system (CMTS) hardware. In a worldwide cable broadband business quickly migrating to virtualized schemes, look for these vendors to talk about their own virtualized cable access products on their fourth-quarter earnings calls.

Research company Dell’Oro Group, which closely tracks the cable access technology business, also said last week that revenue from virtual CMTS revenue will grow from $90 million last year to $418 million in 2024.

But overall, that migration from hardware to software won’t be great for business long-term. Dell’Oro also predicted that global cable access revenue will decline 5% over the same five-year span.

“Global operators continue to invest in their broadband access networks, but are increasingly delivering more capacity with lower-cost, virtualized hardware,” Dell’Oro Group senior research director Jeff Heynen said. “Virtualization, coupled with subscriber saturation in some mature markets will result in gradually declining revenue for broadband access equipment globally.”

Certainly, Harmonic, which suddenly finds itself in a position of market leadership, isn’t sweating that long-term projection.

The company now boasts five Tier 1 clients for CableOS, including Comcast, which signed a $175 million multiyear deal to use the product last summer.

Harmonic said it now has 23 CableOS clients in commercial deployment. Revenue for the product was up 78.3 in the fourth quarter. Overall revenue for Harmonic was up 7.6% to $122.2 million during the period.

“This is a market category that Harmonic largely invented that we’re leading today and that we’re well-positioned to lead going forward,” Harmonic president and CEO Patrick Harshman told investors Feb. 3 on his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

CommScope and the rest of Harmonic’s competitors certainly take heart in that, despite the early sales activity for CableOS, which is quite hopeful, the virtualized cable access market remains wide open.

Harshman conceded that while CableOS’s 23 operator clients collectively serve 45 million cable modems worldwide, only about 1 million of them are attached to CableOS at this point.

“We're focused on ensuring this first wave of 23 deployed customers continue to be delighted and moving towards leveraging CableOS across their entire footprint from approximately 45 million modems,” Harshman said.

LAS VEGAS — One of the most powerful vendors in the cable industry, CommScope, is having a quiet CES, debuting only one product, which seems to fill in the bottom rung of its WiFi 6 mesh product line.

Last year, CommScope, under its acquired Arris brand name, released two dual-piece Surfboard mesh WiFi systems that supported 802.11ax, otherwise known as WiFi 6, the $550 Surfboard Plus and the $650 Surfboard Max Pro.

Set to be released in the second quarter, the new two-piece system, which has a more simplified two-piece name, “Surfboard Max,” will ostensibly be a little cheaper than the aforementioned systems. CommScope hasn’t released a price yet. And it’s hard to tell how much of a step down the device is from the two previous product iterations.

CommScope said the Max AX6600 “compliments” the first two iterations, featuring two routers, each delivering 6.6 Gbps speeds with a total coverage areas of 5,500 square feet. The system’s third band, with 4.x4 WiFi 6, provides dedicated backhaul.

“Surfboard Max represents the whole-home coverage and gigabit speeds that consumers expect from our flagship WiFi portfolio in a new performance tier designed to meet the needs of an even greater range of consumers,” said Evan Groat, senior VP of the home networks retail products group at CommScope. “Now, people upgrading their home network have a new, powerful and stylish option to support their ultra-high-definition 4K content, high-performance gaming, and connected lifestyle for years to come.”

CommScope said it will add support for sub 6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G New Radio (NR) to its NVG558 fixed wireless gateway.

The NVG558 FWA Gateway platform provides operators the flexibility to deliver 5G NR over sub-6 GHz today and takes advantage of mmWave deployments as they become more widespread. The device has existing support for 4G LTE and 3.5 GHz CBRS connectivity.

The sub-6 GHz 5G NR version of the NVG558 will begin sampling for select customers in Q1 2020. The mmWave 5G NR version will begin sampling in Q3 2020.

“As operators build out their 5G networks, many want to maximize the value of these networks by using them to offer fixed wireless broadband services to customers,” said Joe Chow, senior VP and segment leader, customer premises equipment at CommScope. “The new version of the NVG558 offers these operators a flexible platform for delivering customers smarthome devices, video streaming, gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality,

Millimeter wave spectrum is made up of ultra-high frequency radio waves in the 24GHz to 100GHz range, which can hold and deliver gobs more data. Early 5G networks using millimeter wave tech promise speeds as high as 6 Gbps, evolving one day to as high as 20 Gbps. Latency is also vastly improved, too, going from 20-70 milliseconds with 4G to as low as the ultra-responsive sub 1 millisecond range.

But as Verizon—the most aggressive proponent of millimeter wave today—is finding out, establishing ubiquitous coverage with it is no small engineering feat. The ultra-high frequencies require very short-range broadcast of signals—around 600 to 800 feet—meaning that Verizon has to festoon every street in every city it deploys 5G in with gobs of “small cell” devices. These short-throw, ultra-high frequencies are also prone to all sorts of interference, falling leaves included, and they don’t penetrate walls or buildings.

Video technology vendor ActiveVideo has announced that Cable Bahamas will deploy its cloud-based, virtualized pay TV delivery system.

San Jose, California-based ActiveVideo is jointly owned by CommScope and Charter Communications. The latter uses the company’s CloudTV platform as the foundation of its Spectrum Guide video service, which virtualizes set-top processing and functions in the cloud, allowing operators to deliver next-generation TV experiences even to older set-tops.

ActiveVideo’s solution leverages Zodiac Systems’ software, including the Zodiac Stack set-top box software and Zodiac Matrix cloud integration platform, and is integrated with Minerva’s service management platform and client presentation engine. The end-to-end solution is branded REVGOPlay by Cable Bahamas.

“Our collaboration with ActiveVideo allows us to deliver world-class services across the Bahamas, by maximizing our existing capex and rapidly migrating our entire subscriber base to an advanced UI without needing to ship a new device to each and every home,” said John Gomez, COO of Cable Bahamas. "The flexibility of our virtualized platform will support agile and cost-effective growth as we introduce new services and devices.”

At the IBC Show in Amsterdam in September, ActiveVideo said that 18 million pay TV customers were using its cloud-based technology.

At that time, Charter issued a statement, seemingly aimed at reminding everyone that it’s still using ActiveVideo tech.

“Spectrum Guide has been deployed to millions of set-top boxes across our footprint providing a reliable, modern navigation experience, and virtualization has been key to that success,” said Jake Perlman, senior VP of software development at Charter. “Working with ActiveVideo allowed us to realize the promises of virtualization, deploy a world-class, next-generation TV service at scale and have a flexible platform that supports new features and services.”

However, Charter executives have conceded that they’re looking at Comcast’s X1 and are considering a white-label license of the video technology, similar to the one used by Cox Communications. 

CommScope reported a 29.3% revenue decline in its network and cloud business to $376.9 million, as operators continue to digest ample capacity build-outs that occurred over the last several years.

“Our network and cloud segment sales were lower driven by combination of factors, including customer-driven M&A, strong capacity additions added in late 2018, and to a lesser extent a temporary pause in spending as the industry aligns around a path toward virtualization,” Alex Pease, CommScope CFO, told investment analysts during the company’s third quarter earnings call Thursday.

Sales for CommScope’s network and cloud unit, acquired at the beginning of the year along with its $7.4 billion purchase of Arris, declined 37% in the second quarter.

Related: Arris Chief McClelland Out as CommScope Reports Slow Q2 Network and CPE Sales

“We're starting to see an uptick in CMTS license purchases from a major tier 1 North American cable operator as they begin to exhaust capacity from last year. This is a good indication for continued purchases of current CMTS products to the foreseeable future,” Pease added.

CommScope, meanwhile, said it is in trials with several operators on vCore, a virtual CMTS platform it hopes to launch commercially by the end of next year.

The vendor, long the top cable access tech vendor, finds itself playing catchup in the areas of virtualized network access technology, with Silicon Valley company Harmonic already in the market and deployed with Comcast via a $175 million multi-year licensing deal. Competition-wise, that Comcast deal could prove even more complex if the No. 1 U.S. cable operator moves forward with plans to syndicate the virtualized solution it has cooked up using Harmonic tech.

Also along the lines of next-gen network tech, CommScope said it is working with an unnamed tier 1 cable operator and a chipmaker on a remote PHY device.

But in the here and now, it remains tough sledding for CommScope, with the customer premises equipment business down 12.2% to $826.4 million in the quarter. The vendor attribute the slowdown to reduced spending by cable operators, who are all seeing their video businesses shrink right now. Tariffs from Donald Trump’s trade war with China were also a factor. 

CommScope will acquire the worldwide patent portfolio of Barcelona-based Fractus S.A., a company specializing in base station antenna technology.

The move, announced by CommScope today, settles a patent lawsuit filed in Texas against CommScope and its customer Verizon in November of last year.

Fractus licenses its technology to some of the largest handset and base station antenna manufacturers in the world. the settlement includes a technology transfer of Fractus’ entire worldwide portfolio of base station antenna patents to CommScope.

Before the acquisition, CommScope had around 15,000 patents globally, with more than 700 of them pertaining to base station tech.

“We are excited about this agreement and believe that CommScope is a perfect partner to deploy our patented technology into its worldwide deployment of base station antennas,” said Ruben Bonet, president of Fractus, in a statement.

“The addition of Fractus’ patents enhances the value of CommScope’s base station antenna portfolio and will enable us to offer new and innovative features that will provide significant value to our base station antenna customers,” added Farid Firouzbakht, senior VP of RF products for CommScope’s Mobility Solutions.

NEW ORLEANS — The trend in the video set-top device world has been boxes that have shrunk smaller and smaller, as bulky, energy-hungry DVR set-tops have given way to hockey-puck-like thin-client devices.

However, chatting with Multichannel News at CommScope’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo booth, Charles Cheevers, the longtime customer premises equipment CTO for recent acquisition Arris, said the video set-top is growing anew, pointing to a modular, cube-like piece of hardware that CommScope has labeled the Smart Media Device (SMD).

CommScope’s SMD 7852 features connectivity based on the new WiFi 6 standard and a software stack built on the Reference Design Kit (RDK). This not only enables operators to provide video features like 4K and HDR, but also the ability to integrate popular OTT experiences through the Metrological App Store. The SMD 7852 and its associated IP client device, the VIP7802, were jointly developed in an accelerator program put together by CommScope and RDK Management.

The connected devices are also enabled with far-field voice command technology, enabling operators to pair it with popular voice control software, like Amazon’s Alexa, and turn the SMD into a whole-home controller, or at least one that can handle the television. And notably, the device features a connected speaker to deliver an enhanced audio that operates across entertainment, smart assistant and control scenarios.

For CommScope, RDK and their partners, the device is an important multi-tool to offer operators as rival Google establishes a beachhead in markets like Europe and the U.S. with its Android TV ecosystem.

Telecom CPE watchers will note that the CommScope’s SMD device is already deployed in Europe, with Altice France last month announcing the debut of the SFR Box 8 Smart Media Device. The little box is compatible with both Alexa and SFR’s voice control application.

“Through our combined partnership in connected home technologies, the Smart Media Device will bring voice and media together for an unprecedented user experience,” said said Grégory Rabuel, executive president for general public and companies at SFR, in a statement.

As Cheevers noted, CommScope isn’t alone in marketing an SMD. Roku recently debuted a device that combines a smart speaker with a voice-enabled Roku connected device. And Altice USA started over the summer offering its customers Altice Amplify, an Alexa-infused smart speaker that includes audio technology from Devialet.

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. 

The FCC has given permission to five so-called “Spectrum Access Systems” (SAS) providers to begin initial commercial deployment of CBRS services.

With the expected green-light, Amdocs, CommScope, Federated Wireless, Google and Sony can now start offering services built around the Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) band, a 150 MHz swath of spectrum, ranging from 3550 - 3700 MHz, lofted in the 3.5 GHz band.

Previously, the U.S. government had used CBRS for a small set of applications, including Navy aircraft carrier communications. Cable operators including Charter Communications have been developing technologies recently to use CBRS as a means of building their own cellular footprint, and there are myriad industrial use cases.

Related: CBRS Specialist Federated Wireless Secures Another $51M in Funding

“We can now expand our nation’s broadband capabilities and deliver on the promise of affordable spectrum needed for 4G and 5G to enable the Internet of Things, develop private LTE networks, and bring much-needed spectrum to rural areas, among other uses,” said Iyad Tarazi, CEO of Federated Wireless, in a statement. "This is a big win for service providers, enterprises and consumers and sets the stage for true innovation in wireless communications.”

For its part, Federated Wireless will immediately initiate CBRS services for more than 20 customers in both urban and rural markets across 36 states.

Federated Wireless’ customers include Verizon, Charter, American Tower, Boingo, Ericsson, JMA Wireless, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Wave Wireless.

According to industry consortium the CBRS Alliance, the CBRS band is worth $15.6 billion.

“There’s been an unprecedented amount of coordination and joint development to implement the FCC’s framework, prepare the industry for imminent deployments and certify components and devices,” said Dave Wright, president of the CBRS Alliance.

“We can’t create new spectrum, but we can invent new ways to use it more efficiently," added Claude Aiken, president of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA). "Of course, that reflects the history of the wireless industry of continually innovating to get more out of finite radio spectrum so more can use it. Today, after years of hard work and development, initial commercial deployment (ICD) of CBRS shared spectrum is a reality. We want to thank all those individuals for their magnificent efforts to make that happen. And the FCC, too, for seeing the promise within this underutilized CBRS band, and then nurturing the process to completion."

Less than six months after taking over Arris, CommScope has completely turned over its top-level executive ranks, with CPE chief Larry Robinson slated to walk out the door next month.

Robinson, who departs following a 9% second-quarter sales dip for his division, will be replaced by veteran set-top industry executive Joe Chow, a longtime denizen of Cisco, and later through mergers and acquisitions, Technicolor.

Chow most recently served as senior VP of product and program management at Quantenna, the company that put the Wi-Fi chipset in Comcast’s XB6 gateway.

“My background is steeped in developing and deploying CPE. I delivered software services, DVRs, and broadband gateways. I started the IPTV business at Cisco. Later, I became the general manager for its entire CPE business,” Chow said, introducing himself with a CommScope company blog post.

Having endured quite a bit of M&A himself, Chow added, should help. “Everyone is facing challenges across many fronts. We’re contending with far more diversity and product fragmentation than in the past. Speeds are getting faster. Devices are more connected. Experiences are converging. Connected homes are becoming a reality. But the big question is how this all ties together.”

Related: Arris Chief McClelland Out as CommScope Reports Slow Q2 Network and CPE Sales

As for Robinson, he’d been with Arris since 2013, when the company acquired Motorola Home. He exits right behind Bruce McLelland, the former Arris CEO who was bounced from the CommScope COO position last week, just a few months after his new overlords propped him up in the position.

Other recent high-level Arris departures include Dan Whalen, who oversaw the also-struggling network and cloud business. He gave way to Kevin Keefe, who also joined Arris in the Motorola Home acquisition.

Ian Whiting, who headed the Ruckus Wireless division acquired by Arris last year, departed in June. CommScope senior VP and CTO Morgan Kurk has taken over Whiting’s role.

No matter who’s in the corner offices, Arris is facing many challenges. Not only has Donald Trump’s tariff war disrupted its Asian manufacturing, but longtime telecom technology businesses including set-tops and cable network access equipment are facing disruption.

CommScope paid $7.4 billion to acquire Arris, closing on the company in the first quarter. Immediate speculation had CommScope breaking off the CPE piece from Arris and divesting it. But there hasn't been much buzz about that recently. 

“This decision to flatten our leadership structure expands accountability, which we've been striving to do in virtually every part of our company as part of our transformation,” CommScope CEO Eddie Edwards told investment analysts during last week’s Q2 call, explaining the decision to sack McClelland. “I am deeply committed to CommScope's continued growth and success and with the board's full support I'm taking a more active day-to-day operational role in leading our company through these challenging times.”

Bruce McClelland is out at CommScope, with the company eliminating his COO position.

The former Arris CEO was named chief operating officer in February, as CommScope structured its management team following its $7.4 billion acquisition of Arris.

But McClelland has been quickly spun out, his responsibilities dispersed to CommScope CEO Eddie Edwards and other members of the management team, as each of the acquired Arris business sectors continued to struggle in the second quarter. Arris on Thursday evening simultaneously announced McClelland’s departure and its second quarter earnings.

“This decision to flatten our leadership structure expands accountability, which we've been striving to do in virtually every part of our company as part of our transformation,” Edwards told investment analysts. “I am deeply committed to CommScope's continued growth and success and with the board's full support I'm taking a more active day-to-day operational role in leading our company through these challenging times.”

Challenging indeed.

The Arris Network and Cloud division saw sales slide 37% year over year to $344 million. Large cable operator clients are carefully plotting out revolutionary changes to their broadband networks, pushing out functionality closer to the node in the move toward Distributed Access Architecture, while converting the work of proprietary appliances to software virtualization running on commodity-level servers.

Recently, Arris, Cisco and Casa Systems—the leaders of the traditional cable access technology busienss—have sat on the side of the road, as a new insurgent in the business, Harmonic, has carved out huge deals with Comcast and Liberty Global for its virtualized Converged Cable Access Platform product, CableOS.

Meanwhile, in the customer premises equipment (CPE) sector brought over by Arris, sales were down 9% to $890 million, with Donald Trump’s trade war with China forcing CommScope to make tough manufacturing moves in Asia. Arris manufacturing is in the process of being moved out of China and into the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Sales were also off 10% for Ruckus Networks, which specializes in such things as Wi-Fi, IoT and CBRS deployments. The unit generated $151 million in the second quarter.

Just four months after CommScope closed on Arris, some analysts questioned the move to fire the head coach.

"The Arris acquisition appears worse than we previously thought, with the [virtual CCAP] transition as the unexpected headwind," wrote Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold in a note to investors. "We can appreciate the possible frustration CommScope management might feel, but we do not understand how this action helps.”

For their part, CommScope managers stuck towhead had been McClelland’s key talking points in recent months. Notably, he had position Arris as having a key advantage over insurgents like Harmonic, having written code for cable access networks dating back decades.

“We believe that the fact that we have been writing this code for the past 20 years supporting it, featuring it and are now importing it to these two ends gives us a unique advantage in having something that is very hardened and something that is very featurish,” said Morgan Kurk, chief technology officer.

Added Edwards: “Despite the challenging year, we remain very excited about the combined CommScope and Arris portfolio. We are now just four months into the ownership of the Arris business.

“As we continue to integrate our teams and processes, our enthusiasm for what we can achieve together grows stronger. Together we have a more compelling and diversified global platform to promote service providers and enterprises. To that end, I want to highlight what we believe were some of the exciting growth opportunities ahead for CommScope.”

CommScope has added to its Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) portfolio, announcing the debut of the RD1322 2x2 Remote PHY module.

The new device is expected to begin service provider testing later this year. It installs directly into CommScope’s base NC4- and OM4-series fiber nodes.

Cable access equipment sales have been sluggish of late—they were down 38% in the first quarter, according to Dell’Oro Group—as operators mull how to move forward with DAA.

But CommScope, which closed on its $7.4 billion purchase of Arris earlier this year, believes sales will pick up in the second half of 2019, and it’s trying to match that market.

“Cable MSOs are beginning to wait for remote PHY architecture to mature, which is impacting spending along with the general reduction in capital spend,” CommScope CEO Eddie Edwards said during the company's Q1 earnings call. “With demand for bandwidth continuing to grow at an exponential rate. We expect this trend to reverse and for investment in network capacity to increase throughout the year.

CommScope’s DAA portfolio includes its RPD, Remote PON, R-PHY Shelf, Video Unified Edge (VUE), ICX Switch family, and hybrid E6000 I-CCAP/CCAP Core products. It also features a full suite of virtualized products, including the E6000 Virtual Core (vCore) and vManager framework of tools, including industry-leading monitoring, management, and traffic engineering functions.

“As global operators continue to invest in tomorrow’s 10G networks, the outside plant will represent a primary budget focus,” said Kevin Keefe, senior VP and segment leader of CommScope’s network and cloud division. “Our RD1322 2x2 RPD is the answer for operators looking to maximize their existing infrastructure to deliver tomorrow’s networks and services as quickly as possible.”

Added said Jeff Heynen, research director, broadband access and home networking, Dell’Oro Group: “CommScope has one of the largest footprints of optical nodes among major cable operators worldwide. As cable operators continue to distribute their access networks and increase both upstream and downstream bandwidth, the RD1322 2x2 RPD is an option, as operators choose from a variety of DAAs and pathways as they bridge to tomorrow’s networks.” 

Arris has announced the pending retail availability of two new mesh Wi-Fi systems built around the new Wi-Fi 6 standard.

The Surfboard Max Pro is priced at $649 at Best Buy and directly from Arris starting July 22. It enables speeds of up to 11 Gbps and coverage up to 6,000 square feet. The Surfboard Max Plus delivers speeds of up to 7.8 Gbps. It’s priced at $549 for a two-router mesh system and is available for pre-order from Amazon, Wal-Mart and directly from Arris. Both products come in a cheaper single-router iteration, as well.

The new systems feature the latest wireless and modulation technologies, including OFDMA and High Order Modulation. Arris claims the devices are the only Wi-Fi 6 products on the market that use the new standard for three separate bands.

Related: Alliance Unveils WiFi 6 Certification Program

The Surfboard Max systems also feature management apps for both iOS and Android mobile devices. Support for Amazon Alexa voice-enabled devices is also featured.

“We did our research and took the time to get them right, maximizing the full potential of Wi-Fi 6, tri-band, and mesh,” > said Evan Groat, VP of Arris’ consumer products group, in a statement. “The result is the world’s first true tri-band Wi-Fi 6 mesh systems. They offer performance that no other system can match.”

Offering a physical reminder that the golden age of pay TV isn’t totally gone, TiVo is getting set to debut its next-generation DVR for its cable operator clients.

According to redacted FCC documents first unearthed by Variety, the new device is being manufactured by Arris (recently purchased by CommScope) and will be the “Series 7” follow-up to the Series 6 Bolt digital video recorder, which was introduced back in 2015.

Arris is also the manufacturer of the Bolt, which TiVo sold through both its consumer products division and its B2B MSO business.

TiVo isn’t officially commenting on the new hardware.

TiVo said during its first-quarter earnings call in May that 22 million pay TV households around the world use its “advanced television experience.”

Lately, TiVo has been distributing its UX through Android TV-powered set-tops and other thin-client OTT devices. But the product-photo-bereft FCC filing is a reminder that the old business of supplying full-featured DVRs to MSO clients hasn’t totally gone away.

It was speculated that CommScope might split off and sell Arris’ video CPE business after its purchase of the company earlier this year.

Dell’Oro Group analyst Jeff Heynen, however, isn’t necessarily convinced.

“Set-tops are a mature business but they’re still a good run rate business if you can manage cost and manage supply chains,” Heynen told MCN in a recent interview. “Certainly, the set-top box market is declining, but it still throws off a lot of cash CommScope didn’t have before.”

Global spending on cable access technology decreased 38% year over year in the first quarter to $275 million, with operators in North America and Europe delaying CCAP purchases as they mull moves into Distributed Access Architecture, according to research company Dell’Oro Group.

According to Jeff Heynen, the analyst behind the report, operators are “pushing off new capacity purchases while they determine how to move forward with distributed access architectures.”

This assertion certainly jibes with the explanation of leading Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) vendors including CommScope and Casa Systems, explaining first-quarter declines in CCAP revenue.

CommScope reported an 18% Q1 revenue slide in its network and cloud business, while Casa said its business declined 55.6% during the quarter.

“We’re seeing an industrywide slowdown as cable operators implement a shift to virtual CCAP and DAA,” Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo told investors, describing a “quarter we’re not at all happy with.”

The Dell’Oro report said deployments of 10 Gbps-capable fiber-to-the-home networks, such as the one Altice USA is building in its Optimum footprint, drove increased shipments of XPON1, XGS-PON and NG-PON2 OLT ports.

Overall network access business was only off 2% to $2.9 billion during Q1.

“The 10 Gbps FTTH deployments continue to build momentum,” Heynen said. “The next-gen fiber increases nearly offset the weakness in cable CCAP spending.

And while tier 1 operators are like Comcast and Charter Communications are largely done with the CCAP purchasing needed to build their DOCSIS 3.1 networks, deployments of 1-gig-capable modems is ongoing.

Dell’Oro found a 19% uptick in CPE units shipped during the first quarter. 

As large and midsized cable operators transition to virtualized CCAP, one of the big questions has been, can CommScope’s recently acquired Arris unit maintain its leadership position against the hordes of virtualized insurgents like Harmonic and Nokia charging the gate?

“We’ve worked well with operators over the last 20 years and we feel that we’re a pretty trusted vendor at this point,” Tom Cloonan, chief technology officer of CommScope’s newly integrated Network and Cloud group, said. “It’s ours to lose if we can’t create a good virtualized system.”

In Cloonan’s view, CommScope already has a leg up with its new virtualized Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), vCore, which it showcased at ANGA COM in Cologne, Germany.

‘Using Stable, Hardened Code’

Just as it did back in 2013, when Arris transitioned from the C4 to its E6000 converged access router, it’s using a lot of what it calls “hardened” legacy source code for vCore.

“A lot of people were amazed at how well the E6000 worked when it first hit the field,” Cloonan said. “We worked off of 15-year-old code that had been modified and improved over the years for the C4. And we hope to reap that kind of success with a similar approach. We’re using stable, hardened code in a virtualized platform.”

Based on a micro services architecture, vCore performs CCAP functions in software using off-the-shelf x86 Intel-based servers. But as operators transition to Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) using remote PHY nodes, their legacy E6000 hardware can be used to handle media access control (MAC) processing in lieu of servers.

“We allow the product to change its personality,” Cloonan said. “You can download software and transition it from being a normal CCAP box into one that functions in the Remote PHY world.”

The ability to keep using the E6000 hardware is key, given that CommScope controls 55% of the $1.5 billion global CCAP market with its flagship product, according to the Dell’Oro Group.

CommScope is in trials right now with a number of operators for vCore. “The game plan is to roll out the product in the next 12 to 18 months,” Cloonan said. “We’re picking partners right now for deployment.”

CommScope moves into the virtual market as Comcast, working closely with Harmonic and its CableOS software product, is developing its own virtual CCAP technology — one it could possibly syndicate, just as it does with its X1 video platform, according to a recent Light Reading report.

“Comcast is on the verge of deploying significant CableOS channels in the second half of this year,” Jeff Heynen, senior analyst for the Dell’Oro Group, said. “There are still some hurdles to overcome with respect to management and interoperability. Comcast is in the very early stages of its R-PHY deployment and will likely use a combination of gear from Harmonic, Arris and Cisco, with Arris and Cisco providing R-PHY nodes tied to existing E6000 and CBR-8 CCAP cores.”

In Europe, Vodafone Germany, Com Hem, Stofa and TDS are in the midst of moving quickly to virtualization and DAA, seeking to capitalize on benefits including dramatically reduced power consumption and easier service and maintenance.

In the U.S., Cox Communications and Altice USA are also likely to make moves to DAA on “a soonish timeline,” Heynen said, adding that the “jury is still out” on Charter Communications and any respective DAA transition.

But right now, major domestic DAA activity remains focused on Comcast, which is trying to work out the economics of having a lot more nodes in the field do a lot more of the network processing.

“Comcast will deploy a significant number of virtualized platforms alongside the R-PHY nodes because, economically and environmentally, they have to get the overall price per service group down in order to hit very aggressive targets for their DAA deployment,’ Heynen said. “You can’t deploy 10 times your existing node base without doing something very radical to the current DOCSIS channel pricing regime.”

Also at ANGA COM, CommScope was busy demonstrating several other technologies that are even more forward-looking — low-latency DOCSIS and Frequency-Division Duplex (Soft FDD) DOCSIS.

Within the confines of industry tech consortium CableLabs, CommScope is on committees developing these respective technologies, and the vendor used ANGA COM to show how they might work.

With 5G promising to reduce the typical 25-35 millisecond latency down to as low as 1 millisecond — the kind of network performance that would benefit advanced gaming, virtual reality and autonomous vehicles — CommScope is hoping to deliver a similar level of performance with low-latency DOCSIS.

Among the low-latency solutions being discussed in committee, according to Cloonan, is a system of dividing network packets by application, identifying those that apply to low-latency applications and giving them priority.

‘Soft FDD’ Emerges As Alternative

CommScope also is working with CableLabs on Soft FDD, which Cloonan said could emerge as an alternative for cable operators for which a transition to the “node plus zero” environment required by the next-generation Full Duplex (FDX) DOCSIS standard simply isn’t feasible.

Ultimately, FDX promises symmetrical data speeds as high as 10 Gigabits per second, with the signals stacked on top of one another — a scheme that doesn’t respond well to application beyond the node.

Soft FDD would allow operators to “take FDX equipment and not use it in an FDX way,” Cloonan said, keeping the upstream and downstream signals separate, as they have been for the past 50 years.

Rather, through software, operators would be able to remotely determine how spectrum is split from upstream and downstream channels.

CommScope is making its first appearance at ANGA COM in Cologne, Germany since acquiring Arris, and it will be subsequently demoing a range of new DOCSIS-enabled cable network technologies, as well as its own virtual CCAP.

With insurgent makers of software-powered Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) tech such as Harmonic and Nokia nipping at its heels, CommScope is showing off the E6000 vCore, a fully virtualized CCAP that it says is already in trials, with “significant deployments anticipated later this year.”

CommScope’s virtualized CCAP will initially run on the company’s dedicated CCAP hardware, the E6000. But it will soon move to support Intel-powered x86 servers as the vendor’s cable operator clients move into Distributed Access Architecture (DAA).

Meanwhile, with wireless competitors touting the ultra low latency of their developing 5G networks, CommScope is demoing a low latency version of DOCSIS that will reduce typical latency from around 25 milliseconds to around 1 millisecond.

CommScope’s demo will compare gaming applications on regular service flows against games running over prioritized low-latency flow. Among many other applications, low-latency DOCSIS, the company noted, will be crucial to gaming and virtual reality performance, as well as collision-avoidance systems in self-driving cars.

Also being demo’d: Frequency-Division Duplex (aka Soft FDD), which allows operators to remotely conduct frequency splits via software. Soft FDD uses Full Duplex DOCSIS technology and provides a foundation for symmetrical services, CommScope said

“Residential home networks now rival enterprises in both demands from internet-connected devices and for performance of managed services,” said Kevin Keefe, CommScope’s senior VP and segment leader, network & cloud. “We are developing technology and architectures that result in smarter, adaptive networks. With these announcements, we’re accelerating the march toward virtual, automated and orchestrated infrastructure capable of delivering massive amounts of capacity and bandwidth.”

Consumers’ appetite for video is astounding. Studies indicate over-the-top video now accounts for about 80% of downstream data, and growth in broadband consumption is directly tied to services like Netflix. Data usage and service-tier levels are more than 10 times higher than a decade ago. Because of these changes, many operators are migrating to a managed internet protocol (IP) video service to remain competitive.

IP video provides operators with a way to address consumers’ growing bandwidth demands by reducing quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) spectrum as customers switch from legacy video to IP video services. However, this transition period requires operators to carry additional capacity to simultaneously support both video types, which could force an extensive plant overhaul. Operators must also manage concurrent increasing bandwidth demands for broadband data during this multiyear IP-video transition.

Leveraging the Cloud

One technology that easily enables increased network capacity and speed is switched digital video (SDV), which requires no changes to the outside plant. In the past, SDV had high initial costs (especially for smaller systems) due to its hardware-centric approach. It also suffered from complicated installation and limited spectrum gains. But these past barriers have been removed, and cloud-based SDV is now the perfect option for cable operators that need more spectrum fast with minimal new investments. This is ideal for the IP video migration that creates a bandwidth bubble during the transition.

Like IP video, cloud-based SDV reduces video spectrum requirements by selectively delivering only the channels customers want to view at a given time, so unused content doesn’t take up space on the network. This frees spectrum that can now be used to increase network data capacity.

That’s a smart strategy, since studies have shown as little as 10% of TV programs get 90% of views. By using bandwidth more efficiently and optimizing channel lineups, new cloud-based SDV can potentially save more than 400 Megahertz of spectrum. There will even be enough left over for multi-Gigabit services in the downstream, as well as 204 MHz available upstream for 1 Gigabit-per-second symmetric service.

In its early days, SDV had a high initial cost that prevented use by small or mid-tier operators. But the new cloud-based SDV technology is a cost-effective option for providers, who can take advantage of a financial model where they pay only per tuner and per edge QAM channel. A recent case study showed an operator using cloud-based SDV could double IP data bandwidth capacity at a price of just $15 per subscriber, far less than what’s needed for a plant upgrade. Small-to-midsized cable operators thus have a lower barrier to entry and share a level playing field with larger companies. They can leverage a technology that wasn’t previously available to them.

Cloud-based SDV technology is primarily a software installation in the headend and set-top box. Providers can complete SDV updates without touching the outside plant. The Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) box enables EQAMs to be software configured for SDV and then merged into radio frequency outputs with no hardware changes needed in the headend. A CCAP also typically has a much smaller service group size than older cable-modem termination systems, important for amplifying SDV spectrum gains. Cloud-based SDV is installed within weeks, making it an ideal stepping stone to technologies like IP video or to expand consumers’ Gigabit broadband capacity.

Reconfiguring Made Easy

Cable providers can maximize their SDV spectrum savings by varying the mix of broadcast and switched content. Older SDV systems used conservative parameters for limited gains, but with newer CCAP and cloud-based SDV, providers have more freedom to reconfigure systems and reclaim 400 MHz or more of broadcast video spectrum. They need a solution to handle both increased demands from the IP video transition and customer data usage.

Operators that want to migrate their systems to IP video must be able to simulcast both legacy QAM and IP video content during the transition, increasing spectrum requirements. Meanwhile, overall data usage continues to increase, so providers must beef up their network capacity.

Cloud-based SDV is the perfect option for operators and customers because it easily and quickly expands bandwidth capacity without altering the outside plant or adding hardware. It also utilizes a fair pricing model and gives smaller providers more chances to save spectrum, ensuring a smooth transition to IP video that delivers a competitive advantage in the rapidly changing cable landscape.

John Ulm is engineering fellow at CommScope.