According to IHS (NYSE:IHS), cable operators worldwide are making major DOCSIS deployments and shifting to remote/distributed access architectures. The research house interviewed cable operators across the globe that collectively control 87% of the world's cable capex and found that 42% of them plan to deploy a distributed access architecture (DAA) by 2017.
Respondent operators said their primary choices for distributed access are R-PHY, R-MACPHY and R-CCAP.
"Cable operators are clearly committed to both DOCSIS 3.1 and distributed access architectures to increase bandwidth in their access networks," wrote Jeff Heynen, research director for broadband access and pay TV at IHS. "Though there is no consensus yet on which distributed access technology most will use, there's no question they will distribute some portion of the DOCSIS layer to their optical nodes."
Other findings indicate:
- The operational benefits cable operators are reaping from moving from CMTS to CCAP are just the first step in a long-term transition to distributing data processing capabilities throughout the network.
- Survey respondents, on average, said that about a third of their residential subscribers will be passed by DOCSIS 3.1-enabled headends by April 2017.
- By 2017, nearly half of respondents expect to have return path (upstream) frequencies of 86-100 MHz, while a quarter expect to have 101-200 MHz of return path spectrum.
