Cisco offers RF channel-bonding

Cisco Systems unveiled a new wideband broadband system for cable providers today that bonds radio frequency (RF) channels to deliver greater speeds.

The new system combines Cisco’s existing uBR10012 cable modem termination system (CMTS) with quadrature amplitude modulators (QAMs) from Scientific Atlanta (SA) and cable modems from SA and Linksys, doubling the CMTS’s downstream capacity from 40 to 88 channels, Cisco said.

The system logically bonds RF video channels, essentially creating a fatter pipe that can deliver data rates to customers “in the hundreds of megabits and potentially gigabits per second,” Cisco said.

In a statement released today by Cisco from the Cable-Tec Expo, chief technology officers from two operators testing the system--Com Hem in Sweden and TDC Kabel TV in the Netherlands--said the system can be used to deliver 100-Mb/s services.

The CMTS’ wideband “shared port adaptor” (SPA) delivers 1 Gb/s of Ethernet traffic to the SA Continuum DVP XDQA24 Edge QAM (or a third-party Edge QAM), using the CMTS’s wide area network slot to match the capacity of its RF slots (thereby doubling its capacity). The Edge QAM, in turn, can support up to 24 downstream QAMs.

At the customer premises, operators can use either a three-channel or eight-channel modem. SA’s DPC2505 modem can support 100 Mb/s of bandwidth by receiving traffic from three bonded channels simultaneously. The Linksys WCM300, available later this year, will support two to eight bonded channels for up to 240 Mb/s downstream speeds.

Using the system to bond upstream channels is also possible, Cisco said.