The cable industry's reference design kit (RDK) is finding a home abroad with roughly half of the operators that have licensed the RDK located in Europe.
During an interview at this week's ANGA conference in Germany, Broadband TV News interviewed RDK Management LLC President and General Manager Steve Heeb about the company's European presence. Heeb said that multiple operators in Europe were in various stages of deploying the RDK's open source materials and protocols.
Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) initially developed the RDK to cut the time it took to deploy new IP set-top boxes, gateways and other devices by using pre-integrated software to provide a common framework for service providers.
By using open source materials in conjunction with a hardware abstraction layer, service providers can cut down their development cycles for their devices from a year to months.
RDK Management is a joint venture by Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC) and Liberty Global Inc. (Nasdaq: LBTY), the latter of which has driven the adoption of the RDK across Europe.
The RDK comes in two flavors. Comcast and Liberty Global have used the video version, RDK-V, in their respective X1 and Horizon set-top boxes while the newer broadband version, RDK-B, is enabled in some of Comcast's broadband gateways.
Last year RDK Management added additional support for the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard that is widely used in Europe.
During last month's INTX cable show, RDK Management said that more than 15 million devices worldwide were running its RDK. The RDK has 275 licensees including 25 cable, telco and satellite providers. (See RDK Expands Global Reach.)
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation