Nokia accelerates cable operators' transition to all-digital, IP and fiber networks with industry-first solution for unified cable access

• Nokia's new Gainspeed portfolio for unified cable access supports all cable access networks including hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC), passive optical networking (PON) and point-to-point Ethernet.
• Virtualized Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) approach provides the capacity, agility and flexibility cable operators need to deliver new revenue-generating services while significantly reducing operating expenses.

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced its new Gainspeed product family for unified cable access, giving cable operators a faster, more cost-effective way to increase the capacity of their existing HFC networks and meet growing customer demand for greater bandwidth services. 

Cable operators' existing HFC networks -- originally designed to carry broadcast analog video -- are being overwhelmed by traffic from IP video, high-speed data services, gaming, file sharing, video conferencing, cloud computing and other business applications.  Collectively, these services are driving a 40-60% average annual compound growth in data capacity requirements. To effectively address these growing bandwidth needs, cable operators must invest heavily in their existing HFC network and in new fiber networks to meet the required network performance levels.

Nokia's unified cable access solution addresses these challenges by leveraging Software Defined Networking (SDN) techniques to virtualize the CCAP. Built using a Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), the Nokia solution pushes cable-specific functions out to access nodes close to the subscriber while centralizing control and management. This approach significantly reduces the costs of traditional cable architectures by eliminating the CCAP as a physical box and replacing the analog optical transmission with 10Gbps Ethernet.

Virtualizing the CCAP also helps to drastically reduce space and power requirements in the headend and hub, while simultaneously delivering full spectrum DOCSIS to every access node, enabling cable operators to deliver multi-gigabit services to customers over their existing coaxial cable. Finally, it provides truly unified cable access by transparently supporting both cable and fiber access in the last mile.

Jeff White, head of business development and strategy for cable in Nokia's Fixed Networks business group said: "The cable industry is at a crossroads and facing change at a level it has never seen before. The current way of building cable networks simply will not scale to meet the tidal wave of IP video and high-speed data demands faced by cable operators. We're helping operators add capacity, greatly simplify the network operations and prepare for an all-fiber, all-IP network."