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Jim Barthold
Broadband Access Systems Inc. has introduced what it calls the "industry's only carrier-class, standards-based, integrated Internet Protocol (IP) access switch for data, telephony and video services."
The Marlborough, Mass,-based start-up said it would seek CableLabs' Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) headend qualification by the end of this year, although the product is designed for later versions of DOCSIS that handle packetized voice over IP (VoIP) telephony.
"We'll be shipping product by the end of this year, so there will be nothing that will be DOCSIS 1.1 (authorized) because CableLabs won't be ready until next year," said BAS' marketing VP Mark Komanecky. "It will be a software upgrade when CableLabs is ready to qualify CMTS (cable modem termination systems). It will be in line first with the other vendors."
Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Networks and 3Com Corp. are all in various stages of CMTS qualification, with Cisco having received DOCSIS 1.0 clearance. A CableLabs spokesman said BAS is not among those seeking the R&D consortium's seal of approval.
Komanecky said that the product will cost $39,995 in an entry level form that supports 2,000 to 8,000 homes-passed and delivers 40 megabits per second (Mbps) data speeds in each direction, including a single downstream channel and four 10 Mbps return channels.
Komanecky emphasized that because BAS is building the product from scratch, it can offer carrier-class quality for VoIP. This, he said, is accomplished by integrating separate functions, including the CMTS, Ethernet switches, routers and external upconverters, as well as telephone equipment and monitoring technology for the return path, into a single system.
"We've built a chassis that can accept different modules that can perform all those functions integrated within the same system," he declared. "You've eliminated the need to have a system with six or seven vendors all pieced together - bubblegum and Band Aids, as one of the MSOs called it."
Another differentiator is the platform's ability to support not only best-effort data services but cable network IP telephony lifeline, he continued.
The BAS chassis, he noted, supports 20 million packets per second which "gives cable operators plenty of capacity to do routing on any port in the system. We made a point to make sure we engineered enough power in this platform to do anything a cable operator would ever want from quality of service to be able to support that for any subscriber, whether it's a cable modem subscriber or an IP telephony subscriber."
Komanecky declined to name customers, but boasted, "we're currently well over-subscribed for our beta sites. Instead of having the problem of who will be testing our products the problem will be who we say no to."
Among BAS' three classes of customers are leading MSOs, ISP integrators and alternative service providers, he said.
"We haven't decided who they are yet, so we're not in a position to mention who they are, but the list includes all the top MSOs and some of the other folks in the industry who are addressing some of the other markets," he said.
BAS will not build cable modems, he emphasized.
"That's not where we add value. We're focusing on the network side," he noted.
The ability to design the product from scratch, he said, gives BAS a head start in developing advanced CMTS functions needed for VoIP and IP video telephony.
"We've developed a concept called clustering," he said. "We can connect up to 128 of our chassis together in a single cluster. When you add a new subscriber on any chassis in the cluster, the whole cluster knows about it. You add a new module into any chassis, the cluster knows about it. When a packet comes and it's routed to wherever it needs to go in a cluster, it's only looked at once and then it's routed.
"We solve the problem of delivering quality service to large numbers of subscribers," he said.
The company, while new, doesn't come in from left field, he emphasized.
"Before we even founded the company officially, we spent a lot of hours with some senior folks at MediaOne and other MSOs to understand the problems and to find what they were trying to solve in the next few years. It isn't like we just got a bunch of smart guys together to build a new product that's fast; we actually spent a lot of time with MSOs and actually had someone here from an MSO who was helping us define our product for several months," he concluded.
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