CableLabs & Cisco open IPTV Innovations Lab

Monday, March 3rd, 2014
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CableLabs & Cisco Open First-of-Its-Kind IPTV Innovations Lab

  • State-of-the-Art Facility Designed to Speed Transition to All-IP Video for Service Providers

ATLANTA, GA — CableLabs Winter Conference 2014 — Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today it is providing CableLabs with core infrastructure and Videoscape components for a new IPTV Innovations Lab in Louisville, Colorado designed to provide cable system operator members with a state-of-the-art location for Internet Protocol (IP) video testing.

IP video is one of several initiatives being driven by multiple system operators (MSOs) to develop and advance new standards for the cable industry. Global IP traffic (fixed and mobile) is predicted to grow three-fold from 2012 to 20171. Consumer mobile connected devices will grow to 7.7 billion in 20172 (up from 5.8 billion in 2012.) The new IPTV Innovations Lab will help service providers further develop and explore the business advantages for IP video, and experiment with the innovative technologies that are advancing multiscreen and cloud-enabled user experiences.

Cisco will provide CableLabs with the core IP infrastructure for the all-IP solutions testing at the facility, including routing equipment, switching, cable modem termination systems (CMTS), RF Gateway-10 (RFGW-10) universal edge quadrature amplitude modulator (U-EQAM), Unified Computing Systems (UCS), storage networks, and a variety of Videoscape components.

CableLabs operates a high-capacity multi-gigabyte pipe between Louisville, Colorado and its Sunnyvale, California location to extend the capabilities of the IPTV Innovations Lab and share VPN capabilities. CableLabs will establish a proof of concept (PoC) to support this and other research and development (R&D) projects at both CableLabs’ locations extending Cisco’s CMTS technologies with Cisco’s latest Remote Physical Interface (PHY) innovations.

CableLabs plans to use these capabilities to test multi-vendor integration between components of an all-IP infrastructure, test CableLabs specifications in a controlled multi-vendor environment, and test the reliability and efficiency of all-IP video delivery under varying impairments.

Additional CableLabs initiatives include the support of client-side application development on an all-IP platform, and the creation of specifications to facilitate the migration of MSOs to all-IP.