Kabel Deutschland achieves 4.7 Gbps downstream with ARRIS gear

ARRIS Group Inc. (NASDAQ: ARRS) says that German cable MSO Kabel Deutschland has used a EuroDOCSIS 3.0-based ARRIS C4 CMTS and 12 ARRIS Touchstone Cable Modem CM820S units to deliver 4.7 Gbps of aggregated downstream data.

Kabel Deutschland conducted the tests at a school in the city of Schwerin, Germany. The cable service provider recently upgraded Schwerin’s cable plant to 862 MHz, and the 4.7-Gbps field test was based on currently available standards, technology, and hardware, ARRIS says.

Each of the cable modems accessed eight bonded Annex A (8 MHz) channels.

“Our field test with ARRIS, with an aggregate download capacity of well over 4 Gbps, was a complete success and underlines the unique selling proposition of our cable network as the only extensive ultra-fast network in the German broadband market,” said Kabel Deutschland CTO Lorenz Glatz. “Using this technology, a feature length movie could theoretically be downloaded in 8 seconds – at speeds faster than a standard laptop or modem can even process – demonstrating that today’s broadband cable network is already a high-performance and sustainable infrastructure offering huge untapped potential.”

“This demonstrates that today’s HFC plant has the capacity to deliver a full IP video load, and that the entire HFC plant can be converted into one or more enormous pipes to meet future consumer bandwidth demands, using current technology and networks,” noted Tom Cloonan, ARRIS CTO, Network Solutions. “We congratulate Kabel Deutschland on pushing through existing barriers to deliver their customers the services of tomorrow, today.”