CableLabs on Jan. 26 announced the issuance of new versions of the Flexible MAC Architecture (FMA) System and MAC Manager Interface (MMI) specifications. The company says the new release denotes the completion of phase one for the FMA specifications, and opens the doors for beginning FMA interoperability events.
As explained in a CableLabs blog article by Jon Schnoor, the company's lead architect for wired technologies, the new versions of both specifications represent important milestones for the cable industry. Schnoor writes:
The completion of the first phase of the FMA project is the accumulation of specification work through the pandemic and defines the Remote MACPHY (R-MACPHY) technology.
As a part of the larger Distributed CCAP Architecture (DCA) program, FMA is defining the complete disaggregation of a CCAP’s functionality. This includes separating the control and data planes and providing standard interfaces between OSS/NMS/Orchestration and the FMA management and control planes, as well as a standard interface abstraction layer to cable access equipment. All of which allows for vendor independence and equipment interoperability.
While the Remote PHY specifications was the first step in CCAP disaggregation, by moving the PHY layer out of the big iron CCAP hardware, FMA is the next and final step of a fully disaggregated DOCSIS access network. The DCA specifications are a cornerstone of the 10G Platform that will allow DOCSIS 4.0 technologies to support multi-gigabit symmetric speeds.
Schnoor's blog adds that both DCA technologies have recently reached significant achievements. For FMA, Charter and Vecima recently demonstrated 8.5 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream speeds with their FMA implementation. Similarly, for R-PHY Comcast was able to demonstrate 4 Gbps symmetrical speeds with its DOCSIS 4.0 implementation.
Schnoor concluded, "While this release wasn’t the first release of the FMA specification library, this third version of the issued specifications represent a maturity that allows the industry to begin building and testing interoperable products. As such, the week of January 10th was the realization of the first formal interoperability event for the FMA technology. The event had a total of 10 companies involved with five participating vendor companies and five cable operator observers. This was a tremendous turnout for the initial interoperability event. A significant set of accomplishments were hit at this first event which shows the maturity of products and the specification."