Harmonic has formed a new “cable edge” services group to support deployments of its dense edge QAM and converged cable access platform (CCAP) product lines.
The company’s new Cable Edge Services group includes a team of technical support and field engineers dedicated to providing design, strategy, deployment, migration, and ongoing operations support for cable operators. Initially, the new team will support cable operators deployments of Harmonic’s NSG edgeQAM offerings before migrating to CCAP rollouts down the road.
With the addition of the dedicated Cable Edge Services team, Harmonic said it had created a turnkey solution for MSOs and cable operators looking to expand capacity or add new service groups in an existing live cable edge network.
Instead of charging by the hour, Harmonic said its service model was based on a fixed price and schedule on every support project.
“Cable operators have long turned to Harmonic for our expertise in cable infrastructure and operational issues,” said Nimrod Ben-Natan, senior vice president and general manager, Cable Products at Harmonic. “We’re now taking our service offerings to the next level by simplifying the deployment, operations, and maintenance of the cable edge and live production networks for operators. Our expanded Cable Edge Services help our customers protect their infrastructure investment by enabling them to implement new technologies, such as CCAP, with minimal disruption as their needs and requirements change. We act as an extension of their staff so that they can expand capacity — and reap its benefits — more quickly.”
CCAP will be among the topics of discussion at next week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta. With the continued growth in narrowcast services, such as high-speed data, HDTV, switched digital video and VOD, serving as the backdrop, cable operators, including Comcast, are starting to conduct field trials of the CCAP platform. In conjunction with those trials, vendors are getting their product lineups set ahead of larger rollouts next year.
Along with Harmonic, Casa Systems, Arris, Cisco and CommScope are also contenders in the CCAP arena.
