Comcast Shares Lessons from First CCAP Trial

"It’s not just about dropping in another box,” said Jorge Salinger, Comcast vice president-access architecture, at a Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers conference in Orlando, Fla., last week. “It’s a different beast to manage and deploy. It’s a different ballgame when all of your revenue is running through one box. You have to be careful.” Comcast has been running an operational readiness trial with pre-CCAP gear in an undisclosed market for the past couple of months (CD April 17 p5). Industry plans call for the new access technology to be “massively deployed” by Comcast and other operators next year, and they must still do a great deal of work to build a solid foundation for CCAP, Salinger said. Cable vendor executives told us they're ramping up plans to begin making CCAP devices, and it will be months before they're fully compliant with the new technology.

Operators should conduct cross-training sessions between their broadband data and video groups, which have historically operated separately, said Salinger. He recommended the cross-training sessions begin at the engineering level to create a pyramid of learning from smaller to larger groups. Operators must realign service groups for CCAP, said John Holobinko, Google’s Motorola Mobility vice president-strategy and business development. Operators should plan for the alignment of video and data service groups, which differ in size, he said. With CCAP and edge QAMs offering new economic models for cable operators, he contended that traditional methods, such as QAM striping, are no longer viable.

Because no fully CCAP-compliant equipment is available from suppliers yet, cable operators cannot really test CCAP devices on their plant right now. Salinger said operators can still take advantage of denser edge QAM devices that vendors are now introducing as the providers expand their narrowcast services. Such an approach won’t “strand the investment” in the short term, he said. It will allow cable operators to migrate to a full CCAP platform eventually once equipment suppliers start introducing fully compliant devices, Salinger said.

Comcast’s recent operational readiness trial used equipment not fully CCAP-compliant. Salinger said it gave the company the opportunity to see what kinds of tools, including traps and alarms, were needed for the CCAP environment. Turning to tools, Applied Broadband CEO Jason Schnitzer talked about DCE, a system that his firm developed working with Comcast. An XML-based protocol for configuration management in CCAP, DCE provides a modeling environment with a device configuration emulator.

Several more equipment vendors unveiled CCAP gear and plans at the SCTE conference. Arris and Harmonic demonstrated new, beefed-up chassis that are designed to become fully CCAP-compliant over time, boosting the total number of major players in the CCAP equipment market to six. Arris showed off its new E6000 converged edge router, a CMTS device that it plans to evolve into a full CCAP platform. Company executives told us the E6000 will eventually become their chassis for a fully integrated CCAP device. In the meantime, they plan to link the E6000 to the media services platform, the vendor’s current high-density edge QAM device. “No one is CCAP-compliant at this point,” said Stan Brovant, Arris senior vice president of marketing and business development.

Arris officials said their first software release will turn the E6000 into a massive CMTS that offers four to six times as much density as their current flagship CMTS, the C4. They told us future updates and additions will enable the E6000 to evolve into a full-fledged CCAP device. rris executives said the use of the E6000 as a massively dense DOCSIS CMTS represents a “middle step” that addresses the near-term needs of cable operators as they keep increasing downstream capacities and the amount of bandwidth per subscriber by shrinking the number of households served by a piece of equipment in the headend or fiber cable.

Running the E6000 in CMTS mode will come in particularly handy when operators start bonding as many as 16 downstream channels, said Todd Kessler, vice president-product management for Arris’s CMTS platform. That’s enough to support downstream data speeds as high as 640 Mbps. Most of the current major DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems can bond only eight channels. Kessler said the E6000 is in lab trials with five “Tier 1” cable operators around the world, and that it will be ready to begin field trials later this quarter. Production will start early next year.

Attacking the CCAP market from the other side, Harmonic is jumping into the market by starting with downstream QAM capabilities. Its plans call for tacking on the other pieces, including the upstream and other DOCSIS elements, at a later point. At the show, Harmonic introduced its new NSG Pro chassis, which includes the downstream edge QAM capability of CCAP and will be followed by the upstream line card later. Company executives said their goal is to develop a CCAP platform that can work in a wide range of systems and cable architectures, from highly distributed architectures with small hubs serving 20,000 to 40,000 homes to large centralized systems serving 500,000 or more homes. The NSG Pro is in one U.S. cable lab trial, with commitments for seven more by the end of the year, said Gil Katz, Harmonic vice president of cable solutions. Lab and field trials with international operators are expected to follow next year. Katz said the NSG Pro should be ready for commercial deployments by Q1.