Viavi Solutions acquired Trilithic Inc. for $55 million in cash, “subject to working capital adjustments,” the company revealed in a 10-K filing.

In a deal that brought more consolidation to the test and measurement market, Viavi Solutions acquired Trilithic August 9, estimating then that Trilithic’s trailing 12-month revenue was in the mid-$20 million range.

RELATED: Viavi Buys Trilithic 

Viavi president and CEO Oleg Khaykin said then that the Trilitic product portfiolio “nicely compliments” Viavi’s and “enhances our ability to gain share outside of North America.

He added that the deal fits in well with Viavi’s strategy to drive the consolation of field instruments used for test and measurement.

Some 219 million people worldwide have 1-Gig speeds available to them, or about 3% of the globe’s population, Viavi Solutions estimated in its latest Gigabit Monitor, a database that tracks those deployments.

In all, there are about 603 gigabit internet deployments, up 72% since June 2019, Viavi found.

RELATED: North America Leads Gigabit Deployments: Study

Not much has changed since then with respect to regions that are seeing the greatest rate of 1-Gig deployment growth.

In the May 2017 iteration of the report, North America achieved the highest growth rate, at 57%.

The composition of deployments using FTTP worldwide led all architectures by a wide margin, at 91.01%, followed by HFC networks (5.26%), Viavi said, noting that cellular, at 3.65% now, will rise as operators start to test and deploy 5G-based 1-gig fixed wireless services. Viavi said 25 mobile operators are currently lab-testing 5G, with about a dozen progressing to field trials.

RELATED: Verizon Exec: ‘Meaningful’ 5G Deployments to Start in 2018

The study also found that there are 41 countries with gigabit internet service available in some form, with Singapore (95%) being the country with the highest percentage of the population covered, followed by South Korea (93%), Moldova (90%), and Portugal (64%).

Viavi updates the monitor regularly, basing it on its analysis of current and planned gigabit deployment data. The latest version also factors in population coverage estimates.

There are more than 500 operational or planned deployments of gigabit Internet services, with about 234 underway in the United States, test and measurement specialist Viavi found in a new Gigabit Monitor that will keep a running tab on those totals.

Viavi, which launched its visual database of global mobile, cable and telecom service deployments, said there are at least 350 “live” gigabit deployments on a global basis, with another 164 announced or underway using a mix of technologies, including GPON, DOCSIS 3.1, G.fast, LTE-A, (pre-standard) 5G and 802.11ac.

By technology platform, GPON, with 255 deployments, was well out in front, followed by DOCSIS 3.0 (37), Ethernet (30), LTE-A (10) and DOCSIS 3.1 (9). Looked at another way, 85% of the known gigabit deployments are based on fiber networks, versus 11% on hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks.

By region, North American had the largest share, at 61%, followed by Europe (24%), with the Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa and South America sharing the remaining 15%.

Viavi found that more than 70% of the live gigabit deployments being tracked were launched since the start of 2015.

Viavi noted that its Gigabit Monitor data can be viewed by geography or technology, and whether a service is Announced (service provider has publicly announced deployment plans in a given market), Under Construction (network build is underway), in Trial (a limited live network is in operation) or Commercial (service is currently available to consumers).

However, the database is not intended to be an “exhaustive resource,” noting that it’s based on publicly available data. Notably, ISPs marketing speeds “up to 1 Gbps” were not included.

The company said it will update the database “regularly,” and welcomes new submission or corrections.

Denver -- The DOCSIS 3.1 era is still in its early days, but results from the initial trials are showing that the next-gen platform is fully capable of running at higher modulations, where MSOs can pump out more bits per hertz and deliver services in a more bandwidth-efficient manner. 

Comcast has been testing OFDM signals on all types of plant types as it gears up for D3.1 deployments to see how higher-order network signals (1024 QAM and 4096 QAM, for example) behave, and the news so far is good.

“What we found is that these signals do propagate through the network very well,” Jorge Salinger, Comcast’s VP of access architecture, said Thursday at the Cable Next-Gen Technology Strategies event, put on here at The Cable Center by Light Reading.

That’s also been true on HFC plant that run “long cascades” of amplifiers. In many locations, Comcast has been able to run 4096 QAM without any problems in many locations, he said, noting later that DOCSIS 3.1 trials have shown verified support for multiple modulation profiles, rather than having to support the lowest-common denominator.

Combined, those findings should be welcome news for MSOs that intend to use DOCSIS 3.1 to deliver gigabit broadband services over HFC.

“Our objective is to start deploying gigabit service using DOCSIS 3.1 this year,” starting in the downstream, Salinger said, noting that 2015 was about “network readiness” for D3.1.

He also reiterated Comcast’s stated plan to deploy D3.1 in Atlanta and Nashville in first half of the year, and follow with launches in Chicago, Detroit, and Miami in the second half of 2016.

Liberty Global, meanwhile, is also taking a close look at D3.1, but its use of 8MHz-wide channels with DOCSIS 3.0 (North American DOCSIS uses 6MHz-wide channels) lets it get to 1-Gig (in the downstream) with DOCSIS 3.0.

The impetus to launch D3.1 for Liberty Global isn’t as great as it might be for some U.S. MSOs, but “we are in deep, deep analysis of 3.1,” Bob Greene, managing director, online entertainment at Liberty Global, said, adding that the MSO has issued RFPs for DOCSIS 3.1.

The shift to D3.1 is also gaining lots of attention from the test and measurement vendors. Viavi, for example, just launched a field-test unit for the new specs. VeEX has six products in production or in prototype form that support D3.1, said its president and CEO, Cyrille Morelle.

Though 2016 is largely seen as a year of trail and exploration for D3.1, the adoption curve “will go gangbusters” in 2017, predicted Rob Flask, Viavi’s  director of product line management.

Casa Systems, a maker of CMTS and CCAP network gear that expects to play a key role in D3.1 rollouts, is also seeing trial activity pickup this year, but also sees 2017 “as a big year for DOCSIS 3.1,” said Jeff Leung, Casa’s director of product management, cable products.

The concept for Full Duplex has been around for years, but its potential application to the cable industry is new.

Theoretically, Full Duplex would eliminate the need for cable operators to split the spectrum used for upstream and downstream because they could use the same spectrum for both types of transmissions. That could eliminate the need for MSOs to perform a mid-split or a high-split to allocate more spectrum to the upstream.

Salinger said the potential presented by the Full Duplex concept should not change operator plans to do spectrum splits. It’s simply too early to know if the technology will work as advertised when applied to D3.1.

“We’re not sure how complex it would be to implement,” he said.

Taking aim at a key, emerging tech area for the cable industry, Viavi Solutions has introduced a signal analysis meter that, it claims, is “fully compliant” with DOCSIS 3.1, a new platform that’s capable of delivering multi-gigabit speeds on HFC networks.

That product, which adds D3.1 capabilities to its OneExpert CATV Signal Analysis Meter, embeds a D3.1-based modem based on the Broadcom reference design, said Rob Flask, Viavi’s director of product line management. Notably, the first five modems to achieve CableLabs certification for DOCSIS 3.1 were based on Broadcom silicon, though products based on Intel Corp. chipsets are not too far behind.

Viavi's new test and measurement product, Flask explained, will enable MSOs to test D3.1 signals in the field as operators push the technology out of the lab, ramp up market trials and head toward commercial deployments. Among MSOs, Comcast has already identified the initial group of markets where it will deploy D3.1.

Viavi, which competes in the DOCSIS testing and measurement arena with companies such as Trilithic and VeEX, is entering the mix as operators begin to introduce a platform that introduces new technologies to the mix. D3.1 modems are hybrids that support DOCSIS 3.0 traffic, as well as new D3.1 signals based on OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) and a new, more bandwidth-efficient Forward Error Correction scheme called low density parity-check (LDPC). 

Viavi said it also offers a version of the product with DOCSIS 3.0 with 32x8 channel bonding that’s software-upgradable to D3.1.

Flask said MSO D3.1 activity started to pick up in the early part of the year. “Post CES, things have started to open up dramatically,” he said.