A roundup of vendor and operator news from around the globe. Today's edition focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions.
South Africa
NAGRA, a Kudelski Group (SIX:KUD.S) company, has extended its content protection partnership with Openview, a South African free-to-air direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV service provider. NAGRA Protect cardless content protection solutions will continue to secure eMedia, the operator's Openview free-to-view (FTV) satellite TV platform.
NAGRA Protect is a cardless solution designed to enable control of content distribution including geographic control of an operator's FTV content, ensuring content licensing rules are followed. It is part of the NAGRA scalable service protection offering and is driven by the NAGRA Security Services Platform, a unified security platform designed to secure premium content over any network and to any device, including Android TV.
The Netherlands
Ubee Interactive is providing a DOCSIS 3.1 gateway to support VodafoneZiggo's introduction of Superfast Gigabit Internet service in the Netherlands. For the deployment, Ubee has embedded Business Services over DOCSIS (BSOD) software into its UBC1318 DOCSIS 3.1 voice modem to support small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
The VodafoneZiggo GigaNet service was launched in four initial Dutch cities on Oct. 15: Utrecht City, Vleuten, De Meern and Nieuwegein. Hilversum is scheduled to follow in November, and the national rollout is slated to continue through 2020 in cities and regions including Amsterdam, Apeldoorn, Arnhem, The Hague, Eindhoven, Groningen, Nijmegan, Rotterdam, Tilburg and Wageningen.
Denmark
DSA, a nonprofit antenna association that offers cable services in Denmark, will power its new Gigabit internet services with Harmonic's (NASDAQ:HLIT) software-based CableOS virtualized cable access solution to support higher broadband speeds for its customers. Harmonic's local CableOS-certified partner, Infowise, will provide strategic consultation.
Deployment of the software-based cable modem termination system (CMTS) and end-to-end Remote PHY (R-PHY) system is intended to simplify DSA's migration to technologies such as DOCSIS 3.1. In the future, as DSA upgrades nodes with R-PHY, the CableOS solution will allow the operator to provide even greater speeds.
Japan
Japanese cable operator J:COM has launched J:COM Mesh WiFi powered by Plume, a smart home services offering designed to improve, personalize and secure the home network across all of its cable systems nationwide. In partnership with SCSK, a Plume distributor, this marks Plume's first wide-scale launch in Asia, following several large deployments in Europe and North America.
Powered by cloud-based artificial intelligence, J:COM Mesh WiFi offers an integrated solution that is controlled from the Plume app. The new service offers custom guest access, parental controls, and AI security.
UK
Virgin Media UK is working with CommScope (NASDAQ:COMM) to roll out DOCSIS 3.1-based gigabit broadband across its entire cable network. Gig1, scheduled to be available to nearly 15 million homes across the UK by the end of 2021, is now available to customers in Manchester and Southampton.
Virgin Media UK is using CommScope's DOCSIS 3.1 system, underpinned by its E6000 vCore fully virtualized converged cable access platform (CCAP).