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Cisco vCMTS? Brady Volpe founder of The Volpe Firm and Nimble This, John Downey and Jason Miller Technical Marketing Engineer of Cisco discuss Cisco’s virtual CMTS (vCMTS). The topic came up during ANGACOMs 2021 presentation. I didn’t know Cisco even had a vCMTS, did you? Well, let’s find out what they are doing and if they are really taking away the CLI as discussed at ANGACOM. The discussion is on all things DOCSIS. Tips, suggestions and recommendations. Another power hour of cable with Brady Volpe and John Downey CMTS Technical Leader at Cisco.

See a recap of Primary Channel Troubleshooting on our previous podcast or live stream.

Cisco vCMTS:

  1. Intro
  2. Cisco vCMTS history
  3. ANGACOM topic review when using vCMTS
  4. Differences when using big iron analog vs vCMTS
  5. Changes when interfacing with vCMTS
    1. Dashboard
    2. APIs
    3. 2016 cisco demoed vCMTS
    4. No longer tied to specialized equipment to get like ASICS and FPGAs to get RF connections out of the platform
    5. Compute resource
  6. Chassis base takes longer and is more cumbersome
  7. Get the benefits of Hardware without the long lead times
  8. CNBR – Cisco’s vCMTS
  9. CISCO took there CMTS IOS and put it into a virtual machine
  10. Benefits to cable operator
    1. Space savings
    2. Energy savings
    3. Flexibility
    4. Faster turn around
    5. Ease of upgrades
    6. Ease of Use
  11. What are Ciscos’ drivers for moving to virtual CMTS
    1. Capacity for service group
    2. Easier to do scaling
    3. DOCSIS 4
    4. Technology improvements
    5. Ease of use
  12. Load balancing, particle mode etc
  13. Cisco pushing more software
  14. GUI – take away your GUI?
    1. Using intel based server vs an old iron or analog CMTS
    2. More analytic capabilities
    3. DAA
    4. Mac-PHY – eliminates distance
    5. vCMTS to remote-pay device
  15. Are you in the field?
  16. Are you in a real network?
  17. History of what Cisco did with cloud native
  18. Road map of where product is going
    1. most was around scaling
    2. from service groups and capacity
    3. pod would have three servers on it
    4. add a fourth server
  19. Less then 25% used
  20. cNBR – is not a direct copy from the cBR8 because it’s based off of old technology
    1. Bonding groups don’t really apply
    2. OFDM – how many bands
    3. OFDMA – on roadmap
  21. SNMP – do you support CableLabs MIBS? Not yet and not all of them
    1. SNMP – streaming telemetry?
    2. Want to move more to streaming telemetry
    3. SNMP is there a better way?
    4. Streaming telemetry?
  22. SNMP is from the 80’s.  1980’s technology.  “Slow” Network Management Protocol really Simple Network Management Protocol and doesn’t over-utilize cable modems and CMTSs.
  23. There is no CLI
    1. No leakage testing?
    2. No – Command Line Interface (CLI)
  24. Feedback on CLI missing?
  25. DOCSIS network and 5G network
    1. Redundancy
    2. The vCMTS infrastructure can also support 5G and PON
    3. Our 5G can be on the same infrastructure as the cNBR
    4. Developing network for the future
    5. As a provider or operator have a converged network
  26. I do not want to buy a vCMTS because….
    1. Hardware does crash and CMTSs do too
    2. Servers do crash
    3. But so do hardware CMTS
    4. Software does survive a crash and has redundancy in other servers
    5. Servers get hacked and CMTS don’t
    6. But this is not a valid argument both get hacked
  27. No more analog video?
    1. yup
    2. But honestly analog is legacy – when when operators can afford to move away
  28. Pathrak can go away
  29. DAA is needed for vCMTS
  30. Scaling numbers for DOCSIS 4.0
  31. DAA for DOCSIS 4.0
  32. Dashboards become easier
  33. Operator at capacity should look at vCMTS for upgrades
    1. Move away from old iron CMTS.
    2. Hardware CMTS locks you in to older technology
  34. 204 in Broadband Library
  35. 204 Mhz upstream
  36. 10G a minute
  37. SCTE EXPO
  38. Celebrity Cable Games!!!  Watch Brady and John look inexperienced!  It will be Ugly!
  39. hidden vCMTS benefits in Broadband Library
  40. Machine Learning and PMA
  41. Jeopardy games

End Podcast

John thank you for your time today. This was a great episode.  Our next Episode 77 in August 27th

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