Operators using Cisco’s legacy GS7000 nodes got some good news this week, as Harmonic unveiled a new device which will allow them to upgrade their equipment to support distributed access architecture (DAA) as part of the evolution to DOCSIS 4.0.
The vendor’s Pebble DAA device is a module that can be screwed into an existing node housing to provide PHY-layer functions that typically aren’t present in legacy nodes. Harmonic said the upgrades can be completed without the need to take the node offline, upgrade its power supply or change its cover.
Its announcement comes after Cisco published an end-of-life notice for the aforementioned HFC nodes on May 13. Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen told Fierce the news is significant since GS7000 nodes have been pretty widely deployed throughout North America and Latin America by the likes of Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Comcast.
“Following Cisco’s end-of-life announcement of the GS7K node, Harmonic has stepped up to offer MSOs a path to 10G while enabling them to retain their legacy node infrastructure,” Nimrod Ben-Natan, SVP and GM of Harmonic’s Cable Access, said in a statement.
According to Cisco’s announcement, it plans to stop selling the nodes on November 11, 2022, and will ship the last of them on February 9, 2023. It will stop performing routine failure analyses in November 2023 and by November 2027 it will stop supporting the product altogether.
Heynen noted DAA rollouts are still pretty nascent and Harmonic’s solution will help operators with legacy nodes begin to transition to the new architecture as they evolve to DOCSIS 4.0 and wait for nodes capable of supporting 1.2 GHz and 1.8 GHz of spectrum to become available. The former will be used for the full duplex version of DOCSIS 4.0, while the latter will be used in the extended spectrum variant. The Cisco GS7000 nodes in question max out at support for 1 GHz.
“This is absolutely a solution that allows them to improve the efficiency of their network and remain competitive until the 1.2, 1.8 versions of nodes and amps are all available,” he said, adding such an upgrade could particularly help solve upstream bandwidth issues.
Heynen said the cost associated with installing a Remote PHY device (RPD) like Harmonic’s Pebble solution is minimal and in any event the devices can be recycled when operators eventually upgrade to the aforementioned nodes.
“It’s not a stranded investment per say because you are going to reuse the RPDs. You may not use them in the same node housing, but you’re still going to be able to take out those modules and reuse them when everything upgrades to 1.2,” he explained.
Questions
However, Heynen pointed out that Harmonic’s move does raise some interesting questions about Cisco’s future node and RPD plans. The GS7000 end-of-life notice states there is currently no replacement product available at this time. When asked for comment on whether it plans to release 1.2 GHz or 1.8 GHz nodes, a Cisco representative directed Fierce back to the information listed in its end-of-life notice.
Discussing cable’s future back in October 2021, Cisco CTO of Broadband Technologies John Chapman told Fierce the optionality in DOCSIS 4.0 made it hard for vendors to make investment decisions since it could be “very easy to pick the wrong thing” in a fractured market.
Heynen noted Cisco already sold off its cable amplifier business to ATX back in 2020. He stressed Cisco’s future plans around nodes and RPDs remain unclear, but it seems that Harmonic at least “believes that maybe Cisco is going to walk away from that business too.”