Cable Show 2009: Javelin To Throw More Upstream Cable's Way

Complete Cable Show 2009 coverage from Multichannel News

The team behind now-defunct spectrum-expansion company Vyyo is getting ready to relaunch with a new company name -- Javelin Innovations -- with a new strategy to license the technology to other manufacturers, rather than sell products directly to MSOs.

While Vyyo was pitching a system that would expand a cable plant's capacity to 3 GHz, Javelin is specifically targeting upstream bandwidth.

Moreover, according to Javelin CEO Wayne Davis, the company's new approach won't require any changes on the customer-premises side, with only simple upgrades to tap.

Javelin is promising to be able to deliver an additional 500 MHz of upstream capacity to a hybrid-fiber coax network. The company expects to license its technology to other tap and amplifier vendors, which would integrate it into their own products.

But the Javelin approach will preserve the upstream 5-42 MHz frequency range, by "stacking" multiple legs of the upstream spectrum in space above 1 GHz.

"This will be the biggest innovation in the HFC space in decades," Davis said in an interview here at Cable Show '09. "Node splits will be a thing of the past."

Node splits are a technique MSOs use to increase the amount of bandwidth to a service area, by reducing the number of homes per fiber-optic cable.

Davis, a former chief technology officer of Charter Communications, was hired by Vyyo in March 2007.