Guest Blog by Igor Dayen, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

What do we need to know about New Orleans? It offers great Jazz, and Bourbon Street provides rich insight into New Orleans' past, but we can't overlook that it has been home this year to SCTE Cable-Tec Expo. SCTE is the cable telecommunications engineering show of the year. Nearly 10,000 attendees annually seize the opportunity to discover and learn first-hand about the latest in cable telecommunications technology, products and services. For more than 30 years the industry has relied on Cable-Tec Expo to provide the most energizing, technical knowledge exchange of the year.

New Orleans Convention Center opened its doors to the biggest cable show of the year.

The "welcome" signs made it very clear that all attendees were welcome to be here, share their knowledge and learn from the exhibitors.

Coming from Cisco Live,this is a different world of RF/analog technologies, and frequency modulation -this is a cable show. Also the exhibits are different from what I have seen at Cisco Live as they include the equipment and gear needed to be effective and successful in the cable industry.

Cisco was one of the key players at the show this year. We brought Cisco cBR-8 router,the flagship broadband router.

We also brought with us the following demos that helped us in explaining to the attendees how Cisco plays in the video and the cable access business:

1. DOCSIS 3.1 and video convergence
2. SDN and NFV
3. Remote PHY
4. Optical NCS 2000
5. Infinite Home
6. Virtualized Video Processing (V2P)
7. Video Guard

At the heart of Cisco's booth was Cisco's cBR-8 Converged Broadband Router -the industry's first Evolved Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) that helps cable operators to compete in billboard data rates. Its multigigabit broadband services can offer revenue-generating services to business and consumers. During the show we demonstrated that cBR-8 is capable of running at the DOCSIS 3.1 Speeds using cBR-8. We connected the broadband router to two DOCSIS 3.1 modems and illustrated how we can achieve rate of over 4Gbps. This is an amazing improvement over DOCSIS 3.0 and; therefore, gave customers a sneak preview of what lies ahead.

The cBR-8 is the first integrated CCAP product designed for DOCSIS 3.1. Our full-spectrum can converge all services, including DOCSIS data services and MPEG video services, into a single chassis. This was our second demo where we showed how cBR-8 can handle video and thus provide full video capabilities as well as handle DOCSIS data. Our overall objective was to show and explain that Cisco cBR-8 is a next-generation CCAP that helps cable operators support these services with the industry's lowest TCO over the next five years. We painted a very convincing picture of how cBR-8 will be ready to handle not only the downstream but also the upstream DOCSIS services.

The following picture shows our DOCSIS 3.1 and video converge capabilities. Cisco cBR-8 was a great addition to the exhibits at the STCE event. In my next blog I will show a summary of some of the demonstrations. There was a lot of excitement around the technologies and demos that were delivered at SCTE.

Stay tuned for  more information about the STCE event in part two of this series.

Tweet us @CiscoSP360 if you have any any questions or comments.