Liberty Global-owned Unitymedia Kabel has deployed Arris’ E6000 converged edge router en route to offering its customers a 1 Gbps service.
The customer win has the potential of getting the E6000 into Liberty Global’s additional cable operations in the 13 other countries across its European footprint. Unitymedia serves 6.6 million video customers and 2.6 million data subscribers.
“Arris and Liberty Global have a long-term relationship during which we have deployed Arris broadband infrastructure solutions at Unitymedia Kabel to efficiently grow our broadband services and stay at the forefront of our market,” said Colin Buechner, chief network officer at Liberty Global. “The E6000 CER enables us to expand our services to a whole new level by providing large increases in capacity in a cost effective manner.”
The E6000 is currently being used by some cable operators as a high density cable modem termination system (CMTS) before migrating to the cable industry’s converged cable access platform (CCAP.) Arris said the CCAP-enabled E6000 provides service to over 2 million subscribers around the world. Other E600 customers include Comcast, Time Warner Cable, WOW! and GCI.
On last month’s fourth quarter and year-end earnings call, Arris CEO and chairman Bob Stanzione said that in the second half of last year the cable industry was in a transition period from the classic CMTS platform to the CCAP platform, which started to accelerate in the fourth quarter.
In the fourth quarter of last year, CCAP channel shipments increased 192 percent compared to the previous quarter, according to a report last month by Infonetics Research. Looking ahead, Infonetics Research forecast that the global CMTS, CCAP and edge QAM market would reach $1.7 billion in 2018, a five-year compound annual growth rate of 5 percent from 2013 to 2018.