WASHINGTON - The Cable Show 2009 - April 1, 2009 - Cisco today announced that Service Electric Broadband Cable, which serves the Mahanoy City, Pa., Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Sparta, N.J., markets, is evolving its network into a medianet. A medianet is a network optimized for rich-media. Medianets are end-point aware, media aware and network aware to ensure an optimal quality of the total experience while automating many aspects of configuration and optimization. Service Electric Broadband Cable is implementing the DOCSIS® 3.0 solutions using the Cisco® uBR10012 Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), combined with the Cisco RF Gateway Series of universal-edge quadrature amplitude modulation (U-EQAM) products. This combination provides additional bandwidth to existing nonbonded services, reduces the cost per bit compared with traditional deployment models, and enables the addition of ultra-high-bandwidth bonded downstream service to a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem.

Facts:

• By employing DOCSIS 3.0 channel bonding, cable operators can now deliver next-generation services using the medianet to deliver speeds of up to 160 and 120 megabits per second in the downstream and upstream, respectively; even higher rates can be achieved in the future by deploying modems that support additional channels.
• This dramatic increase in speed will help Service Electric Broadband Cable expand its portfolio of competitive services for consumers and add a new level of network performance with faster access to on-demand, feature-rich entertainment and communications.
• Service Electric Broadband Cable, a multiple system operator in northern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey that serves approximately 70,000 customers, can now offer download speeds of more than 100 Mbps to its consumers and multiple speed packages to meet consumer demands; Service Electric has more than 2,200 miles of cable plant and can offer bundled services to the entire market area.
• Cisco channel-bonded cable modems are designed to meet the DOCSIS 3.0 specifications and to be backward-compatible for use as a single-channel cable modem with DOCSIS 2.0, 1.1 or 1.0 networks.
• The Cisco media-aware IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture enables the convergence of networks and services and provides the intelligence to allow movement of rich media content and services across the network.

Supporting Quotes:

• "Our launch of bundled broadband services has already proven to be a compelling driver for consumers, with an increase in new subscribers for the service," said James Galliford, manager of IP operations for Service Electric Broadband Cable. "The end-to-end Cisco DOCSIS platform not only gives us the technology to integrate phone, Internet and video services, but it allows us to take our customers to a new level of personalized user experiences and a migration path for future services."
• "DOCSIS 3.0 is a medianet solution for next-generation cable access networks and is one of the key network layer components of the Cisco media-aware IP NGN architecture," said Suraj Shetty, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco. "With our DOCSIS 3.0-compliant channel-bonding technology, we are not only powering video, Internet and phone communications, but also providing a future-flexible foundation for the delivery of more personal, more interactive and more social consumer services, which will completely transform the consumer experience."

Supporting Resources:

• DOCSIS 3.0 brings more to cable operators than the ability to increase residential high-speed Internet revenue. Operational cost savings, significantly improved management capabilities, and the ability to expand the portfolio of competitive services on offers for small and medium-sized businesses will encourage steady investments and result in essentially 100 percent DOCSIS 3.0 coverage by 2013. Source: Pike & Fischer - 3/2009
• U.S. residential broadband speeds are rapidly increasing. Between the end of calendar years 2007 and 2008, downstream bandwidth rose by 47 percent. Source: In-Stat 3/2009
• Learn more about medianet.
• Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast home page: http://www.cisco.com/go/vni.
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Technorati Tags:

Cisco, video, Cisco DOCSIS 3.0, medianet, Cisco RF Gateway Series, Cisco RF Gateway 1 and 10 Universal EQAMs, Cisco uBR10012 CMTS, Video 2.0, Cisco Next-Generation Converged Access Networks for Cable Networks, Cisco platform, network