Xtend Networks Ltd. said Cox Communications will use the vendor’s gear to boost the capacity of cable plant used to reach commercial customers.
The deal marks the first in the U.S. for the Israel-based equipment supplier. Xtend’s first announced trial was with Golden Channels, an Israeli MSO.
Cox has been testing Xtend’s equipment in an undisclosed market. There, the MSO has used Xtend’s Block Division Multiplexing (BDM) technology to provide an additional 2 GHz of capacity on its legacy coaxial network. The technology also enables Cox to leverage 3 Gbps of extra downstream bandwidth, and 1 Gbps more in the upstream. Cox has approved the Xtend platform for other markets, but did not say how extensively it plans to deploy it.
Xtend made its formal U.S. entrance in May, introducing a platform designed to boost a cable’s network capacity to 3 GHz. Xtend’s platform, which lives in the physical layer, consists of electronic components ranging from power-passing splitters, fiber node multiplexers and a consumer-side interface device. The equipment is outfitted to operate over DOCSIS, DVB and IP-based networks.
Though Xtend originally predicted that its platform would first come into play for bandwidth-intensive applications such as video-on-demand and high-definition television, Cox is using it to extend broadband services to the commercial sector.
“Commercial customers demand more dedicated upstream and downstream bandwidth and more business-like operating conditions, including QoS (quality of service), than residential customers,” said Cox Director of Engineering Ken Williams, in a statement.
Xtend’s technology allows the MSO to leverage its existing plant to reach business customers “to whom we could not economically justify building fiber,” he added.