Network Technology: As network demands double, cable preps for dawn of Remote PHY era

DENVER – With cable operators under mounting pressure to boost the capacity of their beleaguered networks and offer faster broadband speeds without overloading their headends and hubs with more costly equipment, the industry is now adopting a distributed access architecture (DAA) approach that will spread out the gear throughout their networks.In particular, cable technologists are embracing a promising DAA option known as Remote PHY. Under this scheme, the physical layer (or PHY) of a traditional, dense cable headend CMTS or CCAP chassis is shifted to the fiber-optic nodes in the access network, allowing the data processing functions to occur there...