Arris said SK Broadband of South Korea is tapping its next-gen network access platform, the E6000, to deliver 1 Gbps broadband service and to provide the necessary capacity to support an IP-based 4K video offering that was announced by the service provider last August. 

SK Broadband services about 2.6 million customers with an IPTV service.

Launched in 2013, the Arris E6000 started off as a high-density cable modem  termination system, but will evolve into a fully integrated Converged Cable Access Platform that will also combine edge QAM functions. CCAP-related revenues rose 997% percent, to $1.4 billion, in 2014 versus the prior year, according to Infonetics Research.  

"SK Broadband is the first company to break through the 1Gbps speed barrier in Asia-Pacific and exceeds the high-speed data service levels of most other regions of the world,” Tim Gropp, Arris’s SVP of sales for Asia Pacific  said in a statement.

The companies have been working together for years. In 2011, SK Broadband tapped Arris’s previous flagship CMTS, the C4, to bond 16 downstream channels – enough to deliver 800 Mbps in the operator’s labs.

The 1-Gig work also amplifies some recent momentum for Arris in the region. NBN Co, a government-owned entity tasked with bringing next-gen broadband to millions of homes and businesses in Australia, is leaning heavily on Arris to upgrade HFC networks connected to about 3.4 million homes and businesses. Last week, NBN announced that it will factor DOCSIS 3.1, a platform that will be capable of multi-gigabit speeds, into its HFC network upgrade plans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) – technologies that are playing an important role in the evolution of telco networks and rapidly becoming a point of emphasis for cable, is going to be a huge business, according to a new forecast from Infonetics Research.

The carrier market for SDN and NFV will reach $11 billion by 2018, Infonetics said in a report that takes a deep dive on SDN router and switch hardware and software and NFV-facing elements, such as policy, deep packet inspection, and security.

"For three years, the telecom industry has been abuzz over SDN and NFV, with anticipation and hard work developing the vision, goals, architectures, use cases, proof-of-concept projects, field trials, and even some commercial deployments. We've been gathering data in this early market for nearly two years and are projecting the global service provider SDN and NFV market to reach $11 billion in 2018,"  Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks, said in a statement.

Infonetics is breaking down spending in the emerging market into new SDN and NFV software, which it expects to comprise 20% of the total SDN and NFV market in 2018, as well as “displaced” revenue (12% by 2018) that comes from purchases other than traditional network hardware such as routers and firewalls. The third revenue segment – predicted to be the largest (68% by 2018) will come from “newly identified segments of existing markets,” which mostly includes virtualized network functions (VNFs), as well as ports on routers, switches, and optical gear that have become SDN-capable.

Buoyed by IP capacity expansions, the number of upstream and downstream DOCSIS channel shipments reached 1.2 million in the second quarter of 2014, a new quarterly record that stomped the one set in the first quarter of the year, Infonetics Research said in its latest roundup of the cable access sector.

Infonetics noted that this was also the first time those channel shipments eclipsed the 1 million market for the first time. That figure factors in sales of  DOCSIS-powered cable modem termination systems (CMTSs), Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) products, which aim to combine the CMTS and edge QAM functions, and Coax Media Converters (CMCs) -- stripped down CMTSs that don’t support the core routing functions typically found in a CMTS that are gaining steam in markets such as China and represent a product class that has been integrated with the primary CableLabs DOCSIS specifications.

Combined revenue for CCAP, CMTS, edge QAM and CMC equipment reached $411 million worldwide, up 24% from the previous quarter, the company noted.

Infonetics also found that global CCAP revenue climbed another 42% sequentially in the second quarter as MSOs continue to migrate to the higher density platform and take advantage of their lower per-channel prices. The push to CCAP is most acute in North America, which  saw revenue in the category rise 39% in the second quarter versus the previous quarter.

“The velocity of the shift from CMTS to CCAP remains phenomenal," Jeff Heynen, Infonetics’ principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV, said in a statement.

Infonetics did not initially announce how the market share leaders ranked in the second quarter, but did note that Arris, Casa Systems and Cisco Systems once again comprised the top three. Multichannel News will provide an update on the vendor leaderboard once those specifics are known.

According to Infonetics' report for the first quarter of 2014,  Arris was tops in terms of revenue share with 37%, followed by Cisco Systems (32%) , Casa Systems (21%), and Harmonic (7%).

The set-top market slumped in 2013 as global revenues dipped 10%, but the market rebounded a bit in the first quarter of 2014 as cable device shipments and revenues both rose amid upgrades to more capable models, Infonetics Research found in its latest set-top report.

Although worldwide set-top box revenues declined 3%, to $4.8 billion, in the first quarter of 2014 versus the previous quarter, cable set-top-related revenues and unit shipments both climbed 5% during the recent period, Infonetics said in a report that tracks IP, cable, satellite and digital terrestrial set-tops, as well as over-the-top (OTT) media servers.

Jeff Heynen, Infonetics’ principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV, attributed the cable box  boost partly to swaps and upgrades. “North American cable operators stepped up spending again on top of successive sequential revenue increases as they transitioned higher-end multiplay subscribers to headed and headless video gateways and replaced aging, power-hungry standard-definition boxes with more efficient high-definition boxes,” he said, in a statement

He expects overall STB unit shipments to rise this year thanks in part to an increase in over-the-top media servers as service providers in China and other emerging markets use them to deliver live streaming TV.

While North American still commands the largest portion of STB revenue, the Asia Pacific region will close to within 3 percentage points by 2018, Heynen predicted.

He also estimated that OTT boxes contributed $300 million in revenues in the first quarter, or 6% of global STB revenues. He expects that figure to grow to 14% by 2018.

Arris, which acquired Motorola Home last April, stayed atop the global STB market for a third-consecutive quarter, with 13% of the revenue share, up 3% from the prior quarter. U.K.-based set-top maker Pace was close behind, with a 12% share, followed by Cisco Systems, Samsung, and EchoStar, according to Infonetics.

For the report, Infonetics also tracked ADB, Apple, Changhong, Coship, DVN, Huawei, Humax, Jiuzhou, Kingvon, Netgem, Roku, Sagemcom, Skyworth Digital, Technicolor, and ZTE, among others.

Sales in Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) gear rose 177% in the first quarter, as MSO spending continued to slant toward a high-density next-gen architecture that combines the functions of the cable modem termination system and edge QAM and will pave cable’s path to an all-IP world, Infonetics Research said in its latest market report.

“In a dramatic shift, the vast majority of cable operator spending in the first quarter of 2014…went toward new CCAP equipment instead of the bedrock of cable broadband, CMTS,” Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics, said in a statement.

He said cable operators are on a “steady path adding significant channel capacity” for DOCSIS 3.0, IP video, carrier WiFi, businesses services, and DOCSIS 3.1, a new CableLabs spec that will support multi-gigabit capabilities. Infonetics' latest forecast (see above graph) shows CCAP revenues dwarfing those from the traditional CMTS market.

Still, the quarter presented somewhat of a mixed bag. CMTS and CCAP channel shipments reached a record in the quarter, but the combined global market for CMTS, CCAP and edge QAM gear dipped to $332 million in the first quarter, off 6% from the fourth quarter of 2013, Infonetics said.

The North American cable market is feeling the effects of the CCAP shift. According to Infonetics, quarter revenue dropped 13% despite a 20% rise in CMTS and CCAP channel shipments.  

As bragging rights go, it was a good quarter for Arris, which overtook Cisco Systems in worldwide CMTS and CCAP revenues. Casa Systems, which has been gaining ground on Arris and Cisco, further solidified its position by increasing revenue by 13% in the quarter, Infonetics said.

The precise market share break among those suppliers was not immediately known.

Update: According to Heynen, Arris led the way with a 37% share of revenues for combined CMTS, edge QAM, and CCAP-pointing products,  followed by Cisco's 32%, Casa's 21%, and Harmonic's 7%.

At the end of 2013, Cisco represented 44% of CMTS/CCAP revenues, followed by Arris’s 33%, and Casa’s 23%.