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.”

Juniper Networks said Liberty Global will use its vMX platform to support a network functions virtualization (NFV) effort at the cable operator, which serves about 20 million customers across Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and manages more than 10 million WiFi access points.

Juniper said the deployment marks a NFV-based approach, as Liberty Global will use the vendor’s vMX, billed as a software-based, virtualized MX Series  Universal Edge Router that runs on off-the-shelf x86-based servers, across its footprint. 

Using the vMX as a “virtual route reflector” will help the operator scale its control plane by spinning up new ones on an on-demand basis, they said.

"Virtualization solutions streamline our infrastructure, our operations environment and our global business outcomes,” Andy Grotzke, VP of core network strategy and engineering at Liberty Global, said in a statement. “While our first NFV deployment is for virtual route reflection, we are also evaluating the vMX to rapidly add network capacity and new customers. The ability to leverage a broad set of virtual routing capabilities is very important to Liberty Global as it will enable agile service innovation and increased operational efficiency."

Liberty Global is an existing Juniper customer that uses gear such as its MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers and PTX Series Packet Transport Routers.

With twosessions dedicated to it here today at INTX, network virtualization is a hot topic for service providers and their array of vendors.

Kyrio, the recently rebranded CableLabs for-profit spin-off, has also been taking aim at network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN) in the form a new interoperability lab based at the organization’s Louisville, Colo., and Sunnyvale, Calif., facilities.

Multichannel News recently caught up with Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs, and Mitch Ashley, president and general manager of Kyrio, to learn more about Kyrio and the aims and plans for the new lab and why they think it will be important not just to cable, but to other industries as well.

Multichannel News: In February you rebranded your for-profit NetworkFX subsidiary as Kyrio as it pursued areas like wireless roaming and WiFi testing.  And recently you announced that it will open an SDN]/NFV interoperability lab. Can you offer a bit more detail on the goals of that new effort?

Mitch Ashley: Kyrio is a wholly owned subsidiary of CableLabs and what we're doing is building off the phenomenal technology transfer model that CableLabs has had for the cable industry of creating technologies and innovations that show up in vendor products and show up in cable operator networks and in customer homes. 

NetworkFX (the former brand of the Kyrio spin-off) was started originally around taking the PKI (public key infrastructure) service that CableLabs had done for the entire cable industry -- coming up on over 500 million security keys for devices like cable modems, CableCARDs... That sort of proved out the model for Kyrio. In January we announced the rebranding of the company but also that we were expanding into other lines of business, like wireless testing. 

[For the NFV/SDN lab], we're providing a vendor-neutral laboratory environment where hardware manufacturers, software providers and even chip manufacturers can come in. Much like we do with cable modems and other technologies, now we can interoperable with each other and go through test deployment scenarios, do basic testing across devices in a friendly environment where they know that the confidentiality of their information is maintained. What we focused on was how do we help those vendors get their products to market in a mutli-vendor environment. 

It's pretty difficult for one manufacture to get the bevy of SDN and NFV devices into their labs to do testing with. We provide that platform, where they can maintain an ongoing presence in our interop lab or do some remote testing. And we'll do hosted events -- like the OPNFV interop...on May 9. 

We can also provide remote access to both hardware and software manufacturers and provide new builds and loads onto their equipment and test that across multiple hardware manufacturers and software solutions.

Phil McKinney:  The SDN and NFV worlds are moving fast. We see it having a great opportunity to have an impact on the MSOs but the overall cost of network infrastructure and encourage the vendors to...move quickly. That's why we brought that expertise and opened it up to anybody and everybody not related or tied to cable operators.

MCN: Will there be a qualification stamp that comes out of this like CableLabs does with DOCSIS? 

PM: Even on the cable side when we do an interop, there's no certification or stamp. Anything that happens inside the interop, stays inside the interop. But there are still some gaps in the NFV world around interoperability. They can get access to a set of configurations that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in order to do a better job of bringing the entire industry together. The focus, step one, is just on interoperability.

MCN: How would you characterize the cable industry's work with SDN and NFV with respect to competing industries? Are they in lock-step, ahead of the curve, behind the pack? 

PM: I can tell you that most of the major MSOs are keenly interested in taking advantage of the SDN and NFV worlds. The main driver there is can you speed up the process of deploying new products and new services.

The bigger operators are very involved in SDN and NFV; they are all having discussions with their vendor suppliers. Many of them have their own labs set up. Some are doing deployments...but it's in the early days. That's why I think there's so much excitement about the interop labs.

In this case, we're trying to bring everyone along together and it actually shortens the timeframe of going from, this is a nice concept, one in which I can actually commercially deploy this in a broad-based format. 

A far-reaching technology and business relationship forged by Ericsson and Cisco Systems will focus on next-gen networks and wired/wireless convergence and virtualization, but it also spells trouble for several of their networking rivals.

“[W]e think this news bodes negatively for competitors and partners, including Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Juniper and Ciena,” Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold said in a research note issued Monday in the wake of the Ericsson-Cisco agreement.

Investors seem to agree, at least with respect to Juniper, whose shares were down 7.88% in mid-day trading Monday. Feeling less of the brunt was Ciena (down 1.85%), Alcatel-Lucent (down 0.86%), and Nokia (down 1.46%). Ericsson shares were up 1.35%, and Cisco’s were down 1.09%.

Leopold said the new relationship makes business sense for Ericsson-Cisco, in some of the same ways it does for the pending merger between Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia.

“Both companies (Cisco and Ericsson) bring intellectual property and R&D to the table,” Leopold said. “ Cisco's greatest strengths lie in software, switching and routing, along with its powerful enterprise channel, and Ericsson brings strength in wireless, services, and telco network management."

While he is optimistic about the partnership, which ties together similar challenges and objectives, Leopold warned that many such arrangements have not panned out. Juniper and Ericsson have been partnered up for several years, but have “suffered after Ericsson acquired Redback,” he pointed out.

On a call Monday to discuss the deal in more detail, top execs with Cisco and Ericsson highlighted the incremental growth opportunities it presents, and focused less on how the agreement will impact existing partnerships with other vendors.

Ericsson and Cisco have been in discussions about the deal for about 13 months, with a “significant acceleration” in those talks in the last six months, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said, noting that Ericsson’s service reach (65,000 people in that group) complements Cisco’s much smaller 11,000.  “It’s very much about looking out ahead of what’s in the markets and dramatic transformation of networks and IT.”

“This is a big bet for both of us,” added Ericsson president and CEO Hans Vestberg.

Both Vestberg and Robbins will have management oversight of the partnership, which aims to create an additional $1 billion in incremental for each company by 2018.

Why not just merge the companies? Robbins said partnership was the best way to accelerate the goals that the companies can bring to the table with their respective products and technologies.

“We think that this brings the innovation from both sides and allows us to move now. It allows us to absolutely deliver solutions to our customer immediately”

Vestberg agreed that Ericsson had options to build, buy or partner to fulfill its longer-term missions, “and partner was the only way forward in order to make it efficient.”

“We believe this is the right move for us, right now,” Robbins added.

Vestberg said Ericsson’s existing vendor partnerships will remain intact, and views the Cisco deal as a growth opportunity that will also enable the company to broaden its portfolio.

Representing the next step in the evolution of DOCSIS-powered cable broadband networks, CableLabs recently released a new family of specs that cover a range of “distributed” architectures for the Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), a high-density system that combines the functions of the cable modem termination system and the edge QAM and will play a key role in the industry’s all-IP transition.

The new distributed architectures, which expand on today’s more centralized deployments,  will provide “significant scale advantages and flexible deployment options supporting…both DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1 networks,” Karthik Sundaresan, a principal architect at CableLabs, explained in this blog post about the new specifications, which aim to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability.

The distributed approach, Sundaresan wrote, fits with the software-defined networking (SDN) and networks functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives operators are pursuing, and will run parallel to a wide range of wireless infrastructure architectures.

He noted that distributed DOCSIS deployments are already underway in some markets that use  C-DOCSIS, a modified approach that was originally developed for China’s cable market that has since been formally integrated with CableLabs’s broader DOCSIS initiatives.

CableLabs, Sundaresan explained, is specifying several different Distributed CCAP Architectures (including Remote PHY and Remote MAC-PHY) and will release the set of technical reports and specifications throughout this summer.

The specs will apply to DOCSIS and CCAP vendors such as Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, Harmonic and Huawei, as well as Gainspeed, a startup that is developing a “virtual” CCAP.

CableLabs issued the Remote PHY family of specifications last month (the technology is covered via six specs and one technical report describing the overall architecture). Labeled as “MHAv2,’ they represent an evolution of the original Modular Headend Architecture specifications.

Remote PHY  paves the way for an integrated CCAP to be separated into two components -- the CCAP Core and the Remote PHY Device (RPD) – along with an interface that weaves them together using “pseudowires.”  

A common location for an RPD, which contains elements such as the downstream QAM and OFDM modulators, upstream QAM and OFDM demodulators, is the optical node, located at the junction of the fiber and coax plants, Sundaresan wrote.

Sundaresan said vendors have begun architecting ASIC designs, device platforms and software to implement the RPD and CCAP-Core devices. The specs for the OSS that will manage the devices are under development and will be released this summer.

Comcast has become the first service provider to join the OpenDaylight Project, an open source platform for software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies aimed at building more automation and programmability into the network.

OpenDaylight also announced that Lenovo has become a member of the initiative.

“We have been testing ODL since the project launched to see where it might fit in and have been impressed by the improvements in functionality and stability with each successive release,” Chris Luke, senior principal engineer at Comcast, noted in this blog post about the MSO’s involvement. “We have also been participating with our partner CableLabs on the OpenDaylight sub-project PacketCable PCMM, which aims to develop a southbound plugin for ODL that can manage service flows across Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) devices.”

“With an ever-growing number of endpoints to manage, evolving our SDN and NFV capabilities becomes increasingly important,” said Rakesh Puri, executive director of network applications and systems at Comcast, in a separate statement.

Comcast, Luke emphasized in the blog, is motivated to reduce the operational complexity of its networks, noting that the near-term work involves making improvements to network automation under the operator’s Programmable Network Platform, a framework that outlines a stack of behaviors and abstraction layers that software uses to interact with the network.

“It is our hope that by harmonizing on a common framework and useful abstractions, more application groups within the company will be able to make use of better intelligence and more easily interact with the network,” noted Luke, who is also part of an OpenDaylight Advisory Group formed to provide technical and strategic guidance to the ODL community on the challenges of running real-world networks. “Longer term, we’re working toward creating an architecture where the core of the network is not intimately involved in the operation of virtual networks.” 

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.

The cable industry will have a front row seat as The Linux Foundation moves forward on the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project, an initiative involving a large group of carrier and vendors that aims to build a common, interoperable platform that can accelerate the network functions virtualization marketplace.

CableLabs is a founding member of OPNFV and Chris Donley, CableLabs’ director of advanced networks and applications, will serve on the OPNFV board, according to this blog post by CableLabs principal architect Don Clarke.

Virtualization is becoming a big focus for telecom and, by extension, for the cable industry, which is mulling the best way forward on a virtual form of the converged cable access platform (CCAP), a high-density, energy-saving access architecture that packs in the functions of the cable modem termination system and the edge QAM.

Donley told Multichannel News earlier this year that CableLabs had begun to investigate how a virtual CCAP would look like, noting that such work was still in the “relatively early stages,” and stemmed from CableLabs’ study of the advantages promised by software-defined networking and NFV, which creates a path to putting into software and off-the-shelf servers many functions that have historically been packed into purpose-built hardware.

“OPNFV will create a reference platform where performance and interoperability of open source NFV solutions will be validated. As one of those involved in the early discussions that led to the creation of OPNFV, I am extremely pleased that we have been able to help bring into existence this new forum,” Clarke wrote, adding that CableLabs hosted the inception meeting for OPNFV at the organization’s Sunnyvale location  in June. “For the first time network designers will not be limited by the constraints of fixed hardware to design their networks.”

He added that an open source approach will allow for specs and implementation to “occur simultaneously,” speed up the overall process.

Clarke, who joined CableLabs in May, also shed some light on CableLabs' progress on the vCCAP front, noting that the R&D house has developed a CMTS plug-in for OpenDaylight, an open source SDN controller, that was used by several vendors to show off SDN/NFV implementations at last week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. Clarke said the CMTS plug-in has been incorporated into the OpenDaylight “Helium” release.

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday announced the following members of OPNFV:

Platinum Members: AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone.

Sliver-Level Founding Members: 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Orange, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.

According to The Linux Foundation, OPNFV “will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components.”

Noting that multiple open source NFV “building blocks” existing already, OPNFV will seek to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

The initial scope of OPNFV will be on building NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible. OPNFV will also license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects.

Board officers for OPNFV include Prodip Sen, board chair (HP); Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T); Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell); and Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile).