Cisco Cisco ASR 1000 Series 40Gbps SPA Interface Processor Guide D’Information

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Q&A

CMTS and Wideband Questions and Answers

What are the advantages of the Cisco Systems

Wideband offering?

a. There are major advantages with the existing Cisco

uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router and 5 x 20 line card. The Cisco

uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router has extremely high density and a rich software feature set and is a proven platform for both

voice and data deployments.

b. New wideband capabilities add to the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router leadership position by enabling very high-

speed broadband through channel bonding technology. But wideband is about more than just faster broadband. It also provides the

following important benefits:

a. Cisco Wideband utilizes field-proven, low-cost edge quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). This has two advantages.

First, it significantly reduces cost; RF ports on an edge QAM are typically one-third to one-fourth the cost of RF ports on a

cable modem termination system (CMTS). Second, it enables cable operators to add downstream capacity without being forced

to add upstream capacity at the same time.

b. Second, the new Wideband Shared Port Adapter (SPA) and SPA Interface Processor (SIP) use a network interface slot and

do not take up valuable RF card slots. As a result, the downstream capacity of the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband

Router has more than doubled. A fully configured uBR10012 can now have up to 88 downstreams: 40 downstreams provided

by 8 5x20U card, and 48 downstreams provided via two Wideband SPA modules.

What are the components of the Cisco wideband solution?

a. There is a new SPA Interface Processor (SIP) module (UBR10-2XWB-SIP) in the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router

CMTS; each SIP can take two new Shared Port Adapter (SPA) modules (SPA-24XWB-SFP); each SPA connects over Gigabit

Ethernet to an edge QAM device.

b. Edge QAMs from multiple vendors are supported, including the eXtra Dense QAM Array (XDQA) edge QAM from Scientific

Atlanta. This allows cable operators to deploy field-proven edge QAMs, rather than being forced to qualify a new edge QAM product.

Cisco offers full modularity and compatibility with existing edge QAMs from multiple vendors.

c. Wideband-capable cable modems can receive the traffic; Scientific Atlanta offers a three-channel wideband cable modem called the

DPC2505. For premium customers, Linksys offers an 8-channel modem called the WCM300.

How is wideband load sharing accomplished?

Cisco wideband uses the “packet bonding” technique that is described in the DOCSIS

3.0 specification. Packets are transmitted out

the various channels in round robin fashion. Sequence numbers are applied, and the wideband cable modem reorders the packets if

they arrive out of order.