Arris said its new flagship cable modem termination system (CMTS), the E6000, is now generally available.
Arris’s E6000 Converged Edge Router (CER) was announced last Fall, and was deployed by Comcast and several other as yet unidentified customers in a trial program. Arris said the customer trial phase has been completed.
The new E6000 will be the vehicle that Arris rides toward the CCAP architecture. The ultimate goal for the CCAP (the Converged Cable Access Platform) architecture, which is still being developed, is to be able to deliver high-speed data, voice, and video service from a single connector.
Arris expects to gradually add the capabilities and features of CCAP to its CMTS line as those characteristics are defined, and as customers ready themselves to use them, Arris chief strategy office Tom Cloonan explained recently at the Cable Show.
One of the key elements of CCAP is driving new levels of density and cost-effectiveness, and the company claims the E6000 does that now. It improves on the C4 in terms of service groups and channels per unit of rack space.
The company says the E6000 supports 56 downstream service groups per chassis (16 RU), each with up to 32 downstream channels with Integrated RF sparing. It can also support a maximum of 72 downstream service groups per chassis each with up to 32 downstream channels.
Arris also claims the E6000 provides superior efficiency in power consumption and cooling per channel, all with a fully redundant and fully integrated design that has no single point of failure.
While the E6000 CER functions today as an ultra-dense high availability CMTS, Arris said it also successfully demonstrated the E6000 delivering converged services, simultaneously delivering high-speed data and MPEG video traffic on a single F connector, with hitless RF fail over capability at the NCTA Cable Show 2013.
Bruce McClelland, Arris president, network & cloud global services, said “The E6000 CER software is based on that of the C4 CMTS, which enables seamless deployments,” said McClelland, “Cable operators who deploy IPv6 with the E6000 will benefit from years of operational IPv6 experience gained with the C4 CMTS and from an unprecedented level of service group and channel density, both upstream and downstream.”
The E6000 CER is based on an integrated architecture, versus a modular CMTS architecture. Arris said the advantages of an I-CMTS include fast, easy installation and lifetime OpEx savings compared to the M-CMTS approach, which Arris characterized as more complex.
