Cox Communications and Cisco have taken the cable industry’s converged cable access platform (CCAP) for a test-drive in two trials.

In addition to Cox, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have also kicked the tires on CCAP, which will eventually combine edge QAMs and cable modem termination systems into one ultra-dense platform.

Cisco’s Mark Palazzo, vice president and general manager of the company’s cable access business unit, wrote about the trials in his blog. 

“For what was phase one, we suggested that service providers begin combining video and data QAMs,” Palazzo wrote. “That’s easy to say until you start running out of rack space. We quelled those concerns with our (then-new) high-density, universal edge QAM — the RF Gateway-10 (RFGW-10). Fully loaded with ten 8-port DS384 card (128 QAMs per port), it supports over 10,000 QAMs per chassis – or 160 Gigabits per second.

“This year, we’re deep into phase 2, and current events in CCAP are about continued scale and market momentum. On the scale front, and since last year’s Cable Show, we doubled downstream capacity, and quadrupled upstream capacity. Cox Communications completed two CCAP trials with us, involving the 3G SPA and the PRE5. Its plan is to combine our new CMTS modules and high-density DS384 line cards in the RFGW-10, so as to double downstream capacity, and to simultaneously quadruple wide area network backhaul capacity, all in the existing (uBR10012) chassis.”

While Cox’s trials involved a modular approach, Cisco also has its fully integrated cBR-8 in the works. At last year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Cisco showed the cBR-8 in a whisper suite, which is also where it resides at this week’s Cable Show.