Comcast Cable is working with the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) open source project to virtualize the cable modem termination system (CMTS), SDxCentral has learned.

Millions of cable subscribers throughout the United States access the Internet via residential cable modems. These modems connect to hybrid fiber coaxial cables, which terminate at a piece of equipment — a CMTS — typically located in a cable company's headend.

In recent years, cable operators have been working on new technology that has more functionality than the CMTS — the Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP). The CCAP technology combines the Internet functionality of the CMTS with video encoding and transmitting functionality known as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). This is important for cable companies, because they deliver both Internet and video services.

But Timon Sloane, who is the vice president of standards and membership with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), says a number of use cases have been developed in the Residential-CORD (R-CORD) project. And one of those use cases is a virtual CMTS, which is being worked on by Comcast.

Comcast joined CORD as well as the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) project in November 2016. At that time it declined to say what it was working on with the two open source projects.

Both are hosted by the Linux Foundation and led by On.Lab, which is merging with the ONF.

Big providers of CMTS and CCAP equipment include Cisco, Huawei, and Arris. In 2016, Nokia acquired the startup Gainspeed, which is working on a virtual form of CCAP, according to Multichannel News.