Arris ties optical node deployments to superior advanced advertising

Arris not only sees network diagnostic advantages in taking cable networks out to the edge, but the vendor is also pushing the idea that increasing the sophistication of the edge, along with the raw number of optical nodes, will benefit advanced advertising.

“Think political advertising,” said Dan Whalen,  president of Network and Cloud for Arris, in an interview with Light Reading. “Today, a political advertisement would go to everybody serviced out of the specified headend. In this new model, the people that are advertising for politicians … running only on one side of town. You can actually just target the people inside of that town.”

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As Light Reading noted, cable operators are expected to increase optical node deployments by 10x, if not more, in the coming years, as they continue to push fiber deeper. For its part, Arris is emphasizing the deployment of optical nodes as a means of improving video business offerings including not only targeted advertising but also things like VOD. Whalen also said that Arris sees advantages in combining smaller service groups with software-based network components like virtual CMTS or Converged Cable Access Platform.

"We'll eventually in the next few years build out a virtual core that's just like our E6000 today, but would reside on COTS-based servers," Whalen told Light Reading. With that virtual core, he said, Arris is also developing a "virtual manager" that's designed to extract information about service groups and allow operators "to be predictive about what's happening in that node but also be very targeted in understanding what devices exist off a certain node cluster."