Arris developing three flavours of gateway product

Broadband and TV technology company Arris (Stand E21) is moving ahead with the development of three varieties of the Whole Home Solution, its combined gateway and set-top product, originally developed using the Moxi software platform it acquired.

Bruce McClelland, arris group president of products and services, told DTVE at the ANGA Cable show that Arris was currently providing Moxi, NDS Snowflake and Comcast RDK versions of the platform.

“We are doing Moxi, NDS Snowflake and also Reference Development Kit or RDK which is a Comcast initiative to standardise some of the middleware parts,” said McClelland.

He said the Moxi-based end-to-end offering was targeted at tier two operators, while the NDS version was being developed for NDS customers. McClelland said NDS customers would likely be announced later this year.

McClelland said that US tier one operators were coalescing around the open source RDK developed by Comcast that could be implemented on a royalty free basis, with the underlying technology for the platform being developed largely by Comcast and by CableLabs in the US. Comcast is implementing the platform on its own X1 set-top box. “Comcast has its own UI and middleware but the building blocks are open source and available to all,” said McClelland.