By Daniel Etman, Director of Product Management, Cable Access Business, Cisco

We go into this year's SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo with considerable momentum in the industrial transition to CCAP (or, the Converged Cable Access Platform) - and as trials and deployments get underway, we continue to build-in the features our customers tell us they want.

Chief among them this year is a way to add MPEG video monitoring and SDN configuration capabilities to the cBR-8 - our#Gigababy, as we affectionately call it, and flagship CCAP platform. With 100+ customers deploying cBR-8, across four continents, the industrial desire for gear capable of delivering multi-Gigabit speeds to consumers and businesses couldn't be clearer.

New for the cBR-8 at this week's Expo is an MPEG video monitoring and SDN configuration application, already doing well in tests with several customers in multiple countries. It was designed to enable cBR-8 customers to holistically configure and monitor video on a per-session basis - even if the constituent gear (i.e. CMTS vs. DNCS) remains separate.

The monitoring portion can show performance statistics, on a per-session or per-channel basis, in terms of quality, packets-per-second, packet loss, and pretty much everything you need to properly analyze how well a particular session is doing. Here's a short list of other requested-and-delivered features:

• The Video SDN app can monitor and configure video sessions on converged platforms
• Moving this functionality "outside of the box" yields better overall performance (on-board can result in a lower priority for resources)
• No more need to visit each and every chassis! Relevant information is collected and aggregated from multiple chassis, into a single view
• We purposefully separated the monitor and config functions, to give broader control over who can configure video sessions
• It's a beautiful path to virtualization, because it works seamlessly across virtual and physical edge QAMs.

Plus, it's based on the OpenDaylight SDN controller, YANG models, and REST-ful APIs - staples of the open source landscape.

It's much easier to show you the new video monitoring and SDN config app in person, than to describe it in words. Stop by our booth#648 at to see it in action!