While the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Congress have been busy loosening regulations regarding net neutrality—an issue upon which so many people on both sides disagree—Cisco Systems is also involved in unlocking connectivity of the enterprise networking equipment kind.
The world’s largest internet pipeline maker on Jan. 8 announced a new, highly flexible DOCSIS (Data over Cable Service Interface Specification) licensing plan for its cable operator customers using the Cisco Converged Broadband Router (cBR-8) platform to deliver high-speed broadband, video, and voice services.
Cisco made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, being held through Jan. 12.
The company said that Infinite Broadband Unlocked (IBU) is the first licensing program of its kind in the cable industry designed to help cable operators compete with fiber-to-the-home systems. With this new program, Cisco aims to improve the economics of offering multi-gigabit services via distributed access cable architectures employing Remote PHY (RPHY) technology.
Cisco said the IBU licensing program enables cable operators to focus on business outcomes by simplifying license acquisition and management. Unlike conventional licensing models for converged cable access platform (CCAP) devices, which require cable operators to purchase large numbers of new bandwidth licenses for every service group where they want to offer the expanded service, IBU has only one license type based on bandwidth consumption.
For the first time, Cisco said, cable operators will be free to provision all of the capacity of their CCAP platforms without restrictions or upfront licensing expense.
IBU offers two business benefits to cable operators, enabling them to provision and promote multi-gigabit service tiers across their footprints without the risk of stranding capital; and simplify service group splits and video/data convergence by eliminating the need to purchase additional licenses.
IBU licensing is tied to the number of subscribers across the network, so license investment is highly aligned to revenues. This makes licensing investment much more predictable and simpler to manage.
The IBU licensing plan is available for current and new Cisco cBR-8 customers worldwide.
For more information, go here.