ANGACOM 2013 Review

Here is a quick review of the ANGACOM Cable Show, Europe’s leading Business Platform for Broadband Operators and Content Providers for over 10 years.  Exhibition and congress topics include Next Generation Networks, DOCSIS, HDTV, Smart TV, VoD, PNM, IPTV & Connected Home.

This year Brady Volpe had two topics he presented at ANGACOM.  We already posted one presentation “DOCSIS & Testing Best Practices in an All Digital Network” which you can review here.  We will be posting the other presentation on Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) soon.  ANGACOM is a very professionally run trade show and I recommend that if you can make the trip to Cologne, Germany to check it out.  It is scheduled for the end of May next year.

New DOCSIS CCAP CMTS Enters Market

Harmonic has introduced a new line of DOCSIS CCAP compliant CMTSs.  They are small and compact and have some really interesting concepts that cable operators will find interesting.  Harmonic states that they are – CCAP – compliant: universal edgeQAM today, easy upgrade path to future integrated CMTS, Full QAM agility over the entire RF spectrum (50-1002 MHz), combines narrowcast and downstream M-CMTS applications onto a single system, highly available platform with redundant hot-swappable components.  Also the units are extremely quiet.  Now for anyone who has worked around CMTSs when we say quiet, we mean seriously quiet, which also translates into power savings and energy costs in the headend.  Further, for those with knowledge of the Cisco CLI, it is rumored that the Harmonic CLI will be very familiar.

Harmonic CCAP DOCSIS CMTS

CMTS in the Fiber Node

Another popular topic at ANGACOM were fiber nodes with integrated CMTSs.  Why is this interesting?  With DOCSIS 3.0 upstream channel bonding and DOCSIS 3.1 adding up to 96 MHz of upstream bandwidth, today’s DFB return path lasers are problematic.  By problematic I mean that adding lot’s of upstream DOCSIS channels will eventually force them into a non-linear mode of operation causing the well known laser-clipping problem.  Moving the CMTS to the fiber node presents an alternative to back-hauling all of the upstream DOCSIS data over an analog laser.  Once the CMTS demodulates return path data it can then be transmitted on the upstream using very low cost digital lasers with no non-linear impairments.  When will this happen?  Will there be standards?  Only time will tell, but from the looks at ANGACOM companies are starting to develop cool technologies to play in this market, so cool tech is happening!

 CMTS in the Fiber Node

Thank You

In addition, DHS Tools where kind enough to allow us to hang out in their booth.  DHS Tools is a distributor in Germany.  We would also like to thank C.N. Rood for helping us distribute via mail DOCSIS 3.0 posters in Europe.

There where some great products in the DHS Tools booth, which I will quickly mention – because they also deserve to be mentioned.  Effigis with it’s state-of-the-art leakage detection continues to make product improvements.  We did an article last year about them which you can find here.   Also in the booth was Averna with it’s DOCSIS channel emulator.   Averna is known for their DOCSIS protocol analyzer, which we will be writing a post in the future on both products as this is cool DOCSIS tech.  VeEX also had a nice display of test & measurement equipment.

Summary

This years ANGACOM was a great event and very professionally put together.  We look forward to next year’s event and will be back.  ANGACOM has many good broadband colleagues, vendors and products (Rohde and Schwarz, Excentis, JDSU, PBN, Cisco, Arris, Deutsche Telekom, My-Wire and many more), we did not mention all of them but instead recommend you attend ANGACOM yourself.

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