26 Feb Cable Moves to Virtualization!

Is the Cable Industry ready for change?

Chris Busch from Arris’ believes that 2019 is the year that the cable industry moves into virtualization. Busch said the different paths toward virtualization include PHY for distributed access architecture (DAA), fabric overlays, and MAC PHY. New research has come out last week from the Dell’Oro Group showing that sales of cable broadband access equipment will jump from $1.5 Billion to $2 Billion in 2023. The biggest jump is from the increase in spending on virtual platforms and remote devices. “Global cable operators are investing heavily in distributed access architectures to make their networks more efficient, offer premium bandwidth, and stay ahead of fiber-based competitors,” said Jeff Heynen, research director at Dell’Oro Group, in a prepared statement. “Today’s investments in DAAs will prepare cable operators for a future of 10 Gbps services using a combination of extended-spectrum DOCSIS, full-duplex DOCSIS 3.1 and, ultimately, fiber-to-the-home.”

Busch said in an interview with FierceTelecom, “I think this year will probably be an important year for DOCSIS virtualization. We have virtual evolved packet cores that are now providing data plane and control plane services that are being instantiated for latency reasons, and other reasons, that are valuable to the mobile world that can be deployed really close to the edge.” Also, Busch goes on about topologies that in cable are continuing at the digital transmission layer which, “End up all coming back to dependencies in software systems from management to even control plane in some cases.“

We will see if Arris’ Busch is right on his prediction this year. If it doesn’t happen it will be the next year.

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