The Cisco 1-Gbps wideband shared port adapter (SPA) for the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router enables cable operators to offer high-speed broadband connectivity at scale and to enable new IP services. This product supports both the traditional DOCSIS 1.x and 2.x cable modems and the emerging wideband solutions. The new Cisco 1-Gbps wideband SPA works in conjunction with the Cisco 5x20U Broadband Processing Engine to meet the ever-increasing needs of cable operators that are delivering IP-based data, voice, and video services to an ever-increasing number of subscribers.

Product Overview

The distributed and scalable architecture of the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router can be expanded using the Cisco 1-Gbps wideband SPA to meet the most challenging large-scale IP service needs of cable operators. More specifically, the Cisco 1-Gbps wideband SPA delivers critical cable modem termination system (CMTS) functions, such as:

- Capacity for 24 DOCSIS Annex B and 18 Annex A downstream channels
- Integrated DOCSIS Media Access Control (MAC) processing
- Connectivity to third-party edge quadrature amplitude modulations (QAMs) using dedicated dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
- On-board packet-bonding engine that stripes IP packets across multiple DOCSIS downstream channels

The Cisco 1-Gbps wideband SPA performs all traditional and wideband DOCSIS processing of egress packets, including BPI+ encryption. The wideband MPEG packets are aggregated and encapsulated using the DOCSIS 3.0 packet-bonding technique (that is, User Datagram Protocol [UDP], IP, and Ethernet protocols [that is, packets are DOCSIS over wideband MPEG over UDP over IP over Ethernet]).

Each Cisco uBR10012 chassis can support up to two Cisco 1-Gbps wideband SPAs by utilizing a carrier card that occupies slots 1 and 2 in the I/O portion of the chassis. Equally important, these SPAs work in conjunction with the existing Cisco 5x20U Broadband Processing Engines to more than double the available downstream bandwidth of the Cisco uBR10012 system.