Author: Brent Patterson, Director of Product Management, Motorola Mobility
The number of cable headends in the US has marched steadily downward since the late 1990s. According to Nielsen Focus, the number dropped 35% between 1998 and 2010, from 11,408 headends to 7,426. However, headends aren’t the only area of focus for infrastructure consolidation. Many cable operators also want to reduce hub locations—those physical buildings between the headend and the home that take
care of additional data and video processing. Thanks to new virtual solutions and multiwavelength optics, we see hub consolidation continuing in 2012. With at least one large operator aiming for a 30% hub reduction, this consolidation trend has the potential to save MSOs significant capital and operational expense in the coming years.
Virtual hub solutions, including Motorola’s MOTr Virtual Hub, replicate existing hub designs, but in a small field-hardened enclosure that removes the need for a physical building. With the MOTr Virtual Hub, cable operators can pull supplementary hardware (like additional CMTS chassis) back into the 
headend and transmit signals for multiple services – voice, video and data – over individual wavelengths down to the new virtual hub enclosure. This reduces real estate and also helps operators reclaim fiber. From the virtual hub, those wavelengths are then demuxed and distributed for service delivery to the home.
The Motorola virtual hub solution offers cable operators the highest density of any on the market. A single MOTr solution can serve up to 32 satellite nodes. Operators retain full control over operations between the headend and the home, but at the low cost of maintaining a common optical node housing, rather than a physical building with its associated HVAC, power requirements, and real estate costs. As cable networks steadily evolve, the virtual hub is one more way MSOs can work to consolidate infrastructure, reducing CAPEX and OPEX and continuing to deliver advanced services in volume. It’s a solution that improves cost efficiency, while making way for future growth.
Check out the press release from SCTE here.
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