| Cisco List Price |
$980,000.00
Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router
CMTS
Cable Modem
Termination System
 Brian Wilson - CISSP CCNA CCSE CCAI MCP JNCIA Network+ Security+, email: |
Is the well known author of Slimjim100's Blog - the DOCSIS Engineer Blog (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications).
Brian has taken time out of his busy schedule to help educate us regarding Cisco's million dollar router - the Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router.
So what do you get for just over $980,000.00 (list price) when you are an MSO - Multiple Service Operator or cable company and want to service your customer’s data and voice via DOCSIS cable modems?
Brian, who works on a large number of these "Million Dollar Routers" and has deployed many of them in live networks, is offering us the following details.
The Cisco 10k is a fully redundant CMTS - Cable Modem Termination System that supports up to 64,000 subscribers (largest subscriber capacity per CMTS on the market).
But Brian recommends not loading more than 45,000 subscribers when providing both data and voice services to insure not to overload bandwidth and hardware.
With the Cisco 10k you have up to 8 RF DOCSIS 2.0 5x20 line cards.
You may have 8 of the line cards but there is one catch.
One of the line cards is reserved for redundancy or protection if you plan to run the CMTS with HA (High Availability).
Looking at the rear of the Cisco chassis we can see the rear slots for GIG-E line cards, OC-48 line cards, and/or the newer SPA interface processor cards that allow you to support wideband.
Wideband Architecture:
 On the front of the 10k are power supplies (your choice of AC or DC power) and the PRE (Processor Routing Engine) cards. |
PRE cards are the brains of the CMTS and this is where you find PIMICA slots for the IOS and your console ports.
You also have 1 fast Ethernet port per PRE, but this port is reserved for communication to the RF switch if you plan on using HA for full redundancy.
 The front of the chassis also has a small LCD but so far there has not been any supported functions for the LCD other than displaying the Cisco logo. |
From what Brian has heard from Cisco, in later releases of IOS software the LCD display will support displaying information about the CMTS.
The 10k itself is very large taking up about 18 rack units (RU) and this is just the chassis not including the needed RF switches to support redundancy (they take up 4 RU’s each and you need 2 of them).
So you may now wonder how the command line looks in a Cisco 10k since that thing is the size of half a server rack.
Well it’s the same as any other Cisco router running IOS.
The only real difference from the Cisco uBR (Universal Broadband Router) routers and other Cisco routers is the RF and DOCSIS commands and configuration.
But this is the biggest learning curve you would face if you happen to have to work on a CMTS.
The config on a 10k with 8 line cards is about 80 text pages long with all the cable interface lines, but 90% of it is just repeat commands for the cable interfaces.
Below is a sample of one cable interface config:
! interface Cable5/0/0 no ip address ip verify unicast reverse-path no ip unreachables load-interval 30 cable tftp-enforce mark-only cable shared-secret 7 cable sync-interval 4 cable insertion-interval automatic 20 256 cable bundle 1 master cable downstream annex B cable downstream modulation 64qam cable downstream interleave-depth 32 cable downstream frequency 659000000 cable downstream channel-id 0 no cable downstream rf-shutdown cable upstream 0 description cable upstream 0 connector 0 cable upstream 0 frequency 30704000 cable upstream 0 power-level 2 cable upstream 0 power-adjust continue 6 cable upstream 0 channel-width 3200000 cable upstream 0 minislot-size 4 cable upstream 0 range-backoff 3 6 cable upstream 0 modulation-profile 21 cable upstream 0 s160-atp-workaround no cable upstream 0 shutdown cable arp filter request-send 3 2 cable arp filter reply-accept 1 3 no cable ip-multicast-echo cable dhcp-giaddr primary cable helper-address 172.xxx.xxx.xxx cable privacy accept-self-signed-certificate keepalive 1 hold-queue 1024 in !
Note: This config example is just 1 upstream and one downstream out of 40/downstreams and 160 upstreams.
There are a few vendors that come to mind when talking DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications), vendors like Arris, Cisco, Motorola, Bigband as well as a couple of other vendors, but the above are your top 4 players in the DOCSIS arena.
What’s the difference between Cisco’s 10k CMTS and the other vendors CMTS’s.
Well, this is one of those loaded questions because Cisco’s 10k has the capacity of 40 downstreams and 160 upstreams while most of the other vendors CMTS’s support 16 downstream and 64 upstreams.
Perhaps at first look it may seem the other vendors are behind, but in fact they are not.
The other vendors CMTS’s are a lot smaller and when you figure out the cost per port they are about the same.
But how each vendor supports redundancy is very different.
While Cisco depends on external RF switches to protect the line cards, all the other vendors use an internal RF switch.
The internal RF switch is the superior design and in this capacity Cisco is lacking.
There are always pros and cons when picking vendors, but when it comes down to it, you have two basic things to look for when picking a CMTS:
1. Hardware design
2. Software reliability
Brian believes that Cisco wins the software race with the IOS but he feels that the Cisco hardware design is lacking for the HA protection.
Most vendors have an area they can claim to be the best at, so it actually comes down to the requirements of your network.
All of the vendors use a very similar command line and follow the DOCSIS specification so that they are compatible with all DOCSIS devices on the network.
In conclusion, the Cisco Million Dollar Router works just like any other router, but your customer or device count is much larger, so you really need to be extremely careful when working on the router, because one false command could adversely affect tens of thousands of customers and/or devices.
What has been your experience with Cisco's Million Dollar Router?
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Brad Reese cofounded BradReese.Com Cisco Refurbished which offers one year warranties on Cisco Refurbished and Cisco Repair.
The Leader in Network Knowledge
You think $1M for a Cisco router is expensive?
I work for a telco service provider company that is deploying the Cisco CRS-1 carrier routers. One of the router blades, the 16-port OC-48 (2.5 Gb) card, when fully equipped with long range optics modules, has a list price of $1.1M. That's for just a single card in this router, so $1M for the entire CMTS router looks pretty good.
Very pleased
Very pleased that you consider the list price of $980,000.00 for a Cisco uBR10012 Router as being a bargain.
My personal Comcast internet connection has been costing me $558 per year.
Since the Cisco uBR10012 Router services 64,000 subscribers, a single Million Dollar Cisco Router is helping cable companies generate $35.7 million in yearly revenue.
Sincerely,
Brad Reese
http://www.BradReese.Com
And Don't Forget
Brad,
You should also mention that most cable companies buy at a nice discount. But lets say they are a mom and pop shop and can only muster a 30% discount they are now paying $686,000 for the router.
I know there are tons of other costs associated with operating the router, but I just wanted to point out that no one buys retail.
Well it's 1 million for the
Well it's 1 million for the router but thats for a DOCSIS 1.1/2.0 setup. If you plan on going DOCSIS 3.0 you can triple that cost quick and thats not including any of the needed combining or the $400 modems.
5x20 linecards for this thing cost $120k list
Not sure how he got his figure since the quoted cost per line card on the 10K is about 120k each... That makes this router with 8 line cards 960K just for the RF line cards... Looks like it could be well over 1 million for the router fully loaded.
Cisco ubr10K
Just a comple of comments here. I have installed several of these Cisco ubr10K cable routers in the midwest. A fully loaded unit (7 active 5x20 cards + 1 redundant 5x20 card)certainly CANNOT support 64,000 customers! Given the way people use the internet today, about the most customers the unit can support is around 600 customers per downstream port which equates to 7x5x600 = 21,000 customers. As customer bandwidth consumption continues to skyrocket, this number will continue to drop.
The external RF switches to achieve redundacy is indeed a terrible design. The redicilous amount of EXTRA fragile connectors and cabling they introduce makes them as much of a libility as an asset. Futhermore, they will become useless in the near future when Cisco’s new cable line cards cease to have conventional RF upstream & downstream ports but Gig-E ports instead. Cable companies will NEED to migrate to these new cards to offer data services greater than 35 Mbps to compete with fiber to the home, etc...
M-CMTS or I-CMTS.... What's Next?
M-CMTS is the next step if you listen the the vendors and now you will be forced to use even more external devices (Edge QAMs) to get more and more Downstreams (then next is upstreams) in the end it will allow more bandwidth but at the cost of a lot more equipment thats no longer in one box and the risk of signal device failure is greater even with the promises of redundancy. Only a few vendor have an I-CMTS roadmap and even they will move to M-CMTS in a few years. I think it would be better to just have more I-CMTS routers than a few large M-CMTS setups because at the end of the day one software bug in M-CMTS would hurt your whole network plus it will be very difficult to trouble shoot M-CMTS since the IOS or other software will not have true bus-link visablity into the other devices and finding real fault might be hard.
My 2 cents...
Slimjim100
1 million dollars, 64K
1 million dollars, 64K customers 1 N+1 sparing card
with RF switchers for protections sounds like a deal, but the sad reality is no cable company would ever support even 30K customers on this chassis. can put all you eggs in one basket so to speak.