ORLANDO, FL – CableLabs and Cisco announced the creation of a new software project for the Remote PHY Device (RPD) labeled “OpenRPD”.
The RPD is a physical layer converter commonly located in an optical node of the cable network. This open source software will reside in the Remote PHY Device and will be available to cable operators and RPD vendors around the world.
It is designed to help further interoperability efforts and promote virtualization techniques to speed time to market with new services. With this new software, legacy optical node vendors can build Remote PHY nodes without restrictions or needing to be experts in the latest cable standards and specs.
“More and more of the telecommunications infrastructure is running on open source platforms,” said CableLabs CTO Ralph Brown, in the news release. “CableLabs has a history of contributing to and hosting open source projects. The OpenRPD project helps launch CableLabs increased focus on open source projects for the cable industry.”
“This is open source for cable access. Not only does it help move the industry toward the future architecture but it also enables a new developer community,” added Dave Ward, CTO of engineering and chief architect at Cisco. “Open standards, open source and an open ecosystem community for developers is a key trajectory for networking. We see the Remote PHY architecture and RPD evolving to a more generalized and virtualized architecture that can be applied to all types of access networks.”
