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.

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.”

The telecommunications industry has been riding the hype wave of virtualization over the past few years, and the cable industry has not been immune to this trend. To be sure, virtualization brings significant benefits in terms of improved operations, better resiliency, feature velocity, better customer experience and possibly lower cost, and indeed the cable industry is right to focus on adopting this enabling technology in their operating environment. We expect virtualization to gain meaningful traction in 2020 in the cable industry.

This said, virtualization is an enabling technology with far reaching implications for the operating environment of a cable operator beyond simply deploying a new system, and there is not one optimal approach to pursue; each operator should carefully consider the path to virtualization that is best suited to its current network, operating environment and parameters, service needs, and market dynamics.

Although the focus of virtualization conversations has typically focused on the CCAP—granted an essential component of a virtualization strategy—it is important to note that significant benefits can be derived from virtualizing the management and control planes, which can be achieved even while retaining the legacy I-CCAP. We expect cable operator strategies regarding virtualization to follow four paths in the next five years:

1. Retain the legacy I-CCAP as long as it continues to meet the operator’s needs. Despite technology innovation, legacy technologies tend to stay around a lot longer than one would expect, as long as they adequately meet the operator’s needs.

2. Virtualize the CMTS core while retaining the edge QAMs and move the PHY layer to a remote PHY shelf, which can be located in the headend or the hub. The advantage of this architecture is that it enables the MSO to derive some virtualization benefits while retaining RF from the headend and preserving the edge QAMs.

3. Remote PHY: The CMTS core is virtualized, and the PHY layer is moved to a Remote PHY device (RPD), which is housed in the access node. The traffic out of the headend is IP, carried over digital fiber. This approach allows the operator to leverage existing resources in the headend for MAC processing, keeping nodes simpler (no compute resource) with lower power requirements.

4. Remote MACPHY: The MAC and PHY layers are moved to the node, and a Remote MACPHY device (RMD) is housed in the node and performs the CMTS core capability in the node. This approach is simpler and has lower latency, but possibly a higher power requirement in the node and the need for compute resources in the node.

Although each of the above strategies has pros and cons and significant considerations based on the needs of each operator, it is important to note that all four solutions can be managed by a virtualized control plane, and more modern management tools such as RESTCONF and YANG can supplement traditional tools such as SNMP and CLI to deliver significantly improved management and monitoring. Furthermore, the architecture that the operator adopts today is not necessarily the one it will have over time. For example, Option 2 could be an interim solution for an operator that is looking to ultimately have a Remote PHY architecture but is not yet ready to move away from the edge QAMs and RF. Furthermore, some innovative vendors are developing solutions where the MAC functionality can be either part of the CMTS core or in the node.

It is imperative that an operator carefully considers its needs and makes a well-thought-out evolution plan, rather than be swept by the virtualization wave, and to work closely with a leading industry vendor that can offer the right solutions to meet its needs.

Liliane Offredo-Zreik (@offredo) is principal analyst atACG Research.

Business dynamics remain healthy

Despite headwinds from so-called cord cutting because of the increasing consumption of online video content and attrition from myriad and growing SVOD and other online video competitors, cable operators had a good year in 2019 as growth in the broadband business continues unabated, and business services become a major contributor to revenue. In fact, the stocks of the two largest MSOs Comcast and Charter, posted sequentially 60% and 25% growth through December 2019 (albeit in a buoyant stock market).

According to a recent report by analyst firm MoffettNathanson, cable operators are projected to continue to grow their broadband business for the foreseeable future, grabbing more share from the telcos. At the same time, business services remain a healthy and growing revenue contributor, and the more innovative MSOs have created vibrant business offerings with services such as SD-WAN to the SMB market. Comcast’s revenue from business services was 13.4% of cable revenue for the nine months ending September 30, 2019.

It is true that there are rumblings in the industry about the potential competitive threat from 5G in the form of fixed wireless access; although 5G might over the long term become competitive with cable both in the forms of wireless broadband substitution and fixed wireless access, the state of the technology and cost parameters do not make such solutions economically viable in the near term, and furthermore, cable may indeed reap economic value from 5G (more on this later).

Software-based solutions will gain field traction

Although it is true that 2019 through end of September was not a good year for CCAP vendors in aggregate, with the nine months revenue declining about 30% over the same period in 2018, a closer examination of the revenue make-up tells a different story. The revenue of vendors whose solutions are primarily hardware-based declined about 33% in that period; vendors with software-based solutions saw about 11% in revenue growth, with 41% revenue increasing in the third quarter. Although it is true that some operators slowed down capital investments as their DOCSIS 3.1 rollouts tapered off and as they deployed already purchased equipment, but as they look ahead, many operators are also assessing whether their traditional playbook will continue to sustain their future growth and competitiveness or if they should explore more forward looking alternatives. 2020 will see more meaningful growth in deployments of software-based solutions, particularly as more solutions come in the market. Looking back, 2019 may have been a transition year.

Remote-PHY, Remote-MACPHY or Remote-X

It is unquestionable that the distributed access architecture (DAA) has been getting some traction, led by Comcast’s public commitment to Remote-PHY. This technology, based on the CableLabs specifications issued in 2015, has gained a beachhead over its cousin, Remote-MACPHY, whose spec is under development at CableLabs. Although some operators and vendors have settled on an architecture, there is a growing trend toward flexibility with vendors offering the option to locate the MAC either centrally or on a remove device. DAA will get more traction in 2020, as deployments are now real, and the new technologies are field proven and showing clear benefits.

DOCSIS 4.0 will inch closer to reality

CableLabs is expected to issue the DOCSIS 4.0 specifications, which include Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX) and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD), for spectrum up to 1.8GHz to enable symmetrical upstream and downstream bandwidth. This will help the vendor community chart its way forward on meeting the need for significantly increased upstream bandwidth. Deployments of this technology are well beyond 2020.

Business services

Cable operators will continue to generate an increasing share of their revenue from lucrative business services. Having established a beachhead in the SMB market where they have a natural affinity, they are putting more emphasis on the middle market and the enterprise market. SD-WAN is a particular area of promise for cable operator. Comcast, which entered this market early and aggressively, will continue to grow its momentum. Other operators have started their deployments and will grow from there. Other promising services include WIFI and security.

5G will progressively materialize as an opportunity for MSOs

It is undeniable that cable operators have become a force to be reckoned with in wireless, largely through their MVNO based service offering. However, it is also well understood that a business largely built on reselling a competitor’s service is not the best way to create long-term value, and indeed MSOs have been exploring a number of alternative business models. Charter has made no secret of its plans to use CBRS to supplement its HFC reach in some areas and may well introduce this solution in 2020. An even more intriguing opportunity is the use the extensive HFC network to backhaul 5G traffic. 5G will require a dense infrastructure of small cells; the cable HFC network, with assets and power in the local access network, may prove to have the right infrastructure for the 5G small cells backhaul. This said, 5G will require very low latency, which today’s DOCSIS technology cannot provide but a new industry effort, Low Latency X-Haul (LLX), is striving to resolve this limitation. Much progress will be made on this front in 2020, potentially setting the stage for an exciting opportunity for MSOs for years to come as 5G becomes a market reality.

Liliane Offredo-Zreik (@offredo) is principal analyst atACG Research.

Deepening its view into next-gen cable access architectures, CableLabs has recently launched a working group focused on Remote MAC/PHY, an emerging approach for next-gen distributed converged cable access platform (CCAP) architectures.

“The scope of the work for Remote MAC/PHY…is in its early stages,” Jon Schnoor, lead architect at CableLabs, explained in this brief video that accompanied a blog post about the work. “We’ve just kicked off the program, so the working group is actually defining the type of work we’re going to do.”

CableLabs noted that the new Remote MACPHY working group is part of its Distributed CCAP Architecture (DCA) program, and is comprised of operators, equipment manufacturers, and CableLabs’ engineers.

The resulting work aims to develop one or more specs that enable Remote MAC/PHY products from multiple vendors to interoperate.

The greater focus on Remote MAC/PHY at CableLabs also comes amid recent activity centered on Remote PHY.

RELATED: Test Time for Remote PHY

Both efforts are tied into approaches that take and break down components and functions of the network and place them further toward the edge of the HFC network. A central idea of distributed access architectures are to enable cable operators to reduce power and space requirements of more centralized products that took hold in the first wave of deployments for CCAP, a high-density architecture that combine the functions of the edge QAM and the cable modem terminations system.

RELATED: Ramping Up for Remote PHY  

Cable operators are also looking for distributed access architecture to improve the fidelity of the outside plant and to help them drive more capacity for DOCSIS 3.1 and to set things up for Full Duplex DOCSIS, an annex for D3.1 that will support multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds.

Operators are weighing options whereby they would distribute just the PHY or both the MAC and the PHY, as the latter approach distributes more of the smarts of the network but costs a bit more power to pull off. Vendors such as Nokia are trying to end the debate with distributed approaches that use “universal” cable access nodes that can be configured (via software) to run as a Remote PHY device or a Remote MAC/PHY device.

RELATED: Nokia Touts Versatility for ‘Virtualized’ Distributed Platform for Cable Ops