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Vecima is launching a vCMTS offering
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Analyst Jeff Heynen said Vecima is smart to go after the vCMTS market, as the cable industry is still in early stages of operators moving to DAA
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Vecima is entering vCMTS lab trials with an unnamed Tier 1 operator in North America
The tide in cable is turning toward DOCSIS 4.0, and Vecima Networks is riding the wave.
Vecima this week unveiled the Entra Virtualized Cable Modem Termination System (vCMTS), a new addition to its Entra Cloud platform. The Entra vCMTS is also interoperable with Vecima’s Remote PHY devices, the company said.
vCMTS technology takes access network functions out of the traditional cable headend and places them in software running on commercial off-the-shelf servers. It’s pretty important for cable operators that want to upgrade to distributed access architecture, which in turn paves the way for DOCSIS 4.0.
Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen told Fierce Vecima is smart to go after the vCMTS market, for a few reasons. First, Vecima has “a lot of traction” with its remote PHY devices as well as its remote optical line terminal (OLT) platforms.
That technology is usually operating with an existing converged cable access platform (CCAP) platform functioning as a CCAP core or a broadband network gateway (BNG) providing subscriber management functions for the OLTs, Heynen noted.
“In some cases, operators want to deal with one vendor for both its vCMTS and its RPDs going forward to better manage interoperability and to get better pricing on bundled vCMTS-RPD solutions,” he said. “Vecima clearly hears that from its RPD customer base and sees an opportunity to take some market share.”
vCMTS market ripe for picking
Competition-wise, there hasn’t been too much going on with vCMTS so far. According to Heynen, Harmonic had 98% of vCMTS market share in 2023 and that’s largely due to one operator – Comcast. Casa Systems is another vendor that’s been playing in the space for the past couple of years.
But the market started to pick up in the latter half of 2023 when CommScope launched a vCMTS dubbed “vCore,” touting the fact that cable companies can hit over 8 Gbps with a mix of new and old DOCSIS gear.
“It is important to keep in mind that we are still in the early stages of operators moving to DAA. We are even earlier in the process of operators moving to vCMTS,” said Heynen.
That means the industry needs supplier diversity and now’s the time for Vecima to swoop in and snatch a piece of the vCMTS market, which Heynen tipped to grow from $162 million in 2023 to $366 million in 2028.
“Though CommScope and Casa have announced vCMTS platforms and customer trials and deployments, those trials and deployments have been limited thus far,” he said.
“If Vecima doesn’t do this now, it will be too late, as a growing number of operators are issuing RFPs for vCMTS platforms.”
For its part, Vecima stated it is currently entering lab trials with a Tier 1 operator in North America and will be ready for global field trials by Q4 2024. As for which ISP that might be, we have our eyes on Charter, which already plans to use Vecima’s Entra Remote PHY system for network upgrades.
Heynen said while Charter “is certainly a possibility,” Cox is another option.