The Challenges of Monitoring Upstream Noise in a Remote PHY Environment
The cable industry has been evolving the structure and performance of the broadband Hybrid-Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network since the inception of broadband internet in the mid-1990’s. This evolution has come in order to meet the ever-increasing thirst of the end-user for speed, delivered by higher bandwidth services. CableLabs, the industry standard-bearer for cable technology, has continually produced changes to the DOCSIS standards from DOCSIS 1.0 to the current DOCSIS 3.1 deployed in large part across major cable operators across the world. Each new version has brought higher bandwidth capacity to the copper HFC network and has steadily introduced fiber-optics deeper into the network. While some operators have moved entirely to a fiber solution, deploying Fiber to the Home (FTTH), others have embraced the incremental improvements from CableLabs that allow for use of the existing coax network they have invested in. The Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) is the latest version of technology, with multiple “flavors” springing from the CCAP design, most importantly designs based on a Distributed Access Architecture. Each new technology has increased scale and density to address this need for speed.
