Stofa and ARRIS Complete One of the World's Largest Remote-PHY Deployments

SUWANEE, Ga., Jan. 30, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- ARRIS International plc (NASDAQ: ARRS) and Danish TV and internet provider, Stofa, today announced a landmark deployment establishing one of the largest Remote-PHY (R-PHY) networks in the world in record time.

The deployment ushers in the next era of connectivity for Stofa—extending the capabilities of its cable broadband network well into the future with support for multi-Gigabit services. The complete network transformation utilizes ARRIS R-PHY nodes to deliver Gigabit service across Stofa's footprint in Aarhus, Denmark. The new architecture is backwards-compatible and delivers both video and broadband services from a unified platform, providing important capex and opex savings.

ARRIS's R-PHY technology enables Stofa to virtualize and decentralize headend functions and elements of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) physical layer—enabling the more efficient use of network media as well as service speeds of 1Gbps and beyond. After trialling the technology, Stofa tapped its close partnership with ARRIS to complete the cutting-edge network transformation in Aarhus in seven months.

ARRIS's architecture enables Stofa video services to stream over the network, avoiding impact to customers' headline broadband speeds. Stofa's customers in Aarhus have quickly embraced the new Gigabit services. The positive reception highlights R-PHY's broader consumer and commercial applications in delivering tomorrow's Gigabit services, quickly and at scale.

The R-PHY deployment in Aarhus is the result of an ongoing strategic collaboration between Stofa and ARRIS to enable Gigabit broadband, Ultra HD TV, streaming, and digital services across all of Stofa's sites in Denmark. The companies pioneered the first R-PHY deployment in EMEA, accelerating the rollout of R-PHY nodes; and in the near future, Stofa will transition to cloud-based network provisioning using the ARRIS virtualized management solution. Stofa's implementation of ARRIS technology demonstrates the promise of DOCSIS® 3.1 and Distributed Access Architectures in further enhancing the last mile of the cable network.

"Our partnership with ARRIS enabled us to envision a long-term future for our cable network using DOCSIS 3.1 and R-PHY technology," said Jacob Zentio, CTO at Stofa. "Today, we're making history, pioneering a new era of Gigabit services using next-generation Distributed Access Architectures. Our deployment in Aarhus offers immediate service level upgrades for our local subscribers, while increasing our network's efficiency and capacity. This is just the beginning of our network's evolution, and we look forward to our continued work with ARRIS to create Denmark's network of the future."

"In a tight partnership with Stofa, ARRIS has demonstrated that the right R-PHY solution can power all existing services at scale in a dense field environment, thus ushering in a new era of network transformation to support the digital future," said Liliane Offredo-Zreik, Principal Analyst, ACG Research.

"Stofa shares our vision for building networks of the future, and we're proud of our work together to pioneer one of the world's largest, most powerful R-PHY networks," said Tom McLaughlin, Senior Vice President, EMEA Sales at ARRIS. "Our ground-breaking collaboration is another example of how ARRIS is laying the foundation for a constantly connected world. In just seven months, Stofa is delivering Gigabit speeds and HD services to its subscribers; and it's positioned to deliver new, advanced services long into the future."

For more insights and details on this record deployment, download this 2018 SCTE technical whitepaper authored by ARRIS and Stofa: 'It's ALIVE! Getting to Successful R-PHY Deployment: Do's And Don'ts'.

A video of Stofa's CEO and CTO talking about the successful partnership can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/L7Ci5IyiZFM

About Stofa and SE Group
Stofa is part of the SE Group. SE a.m.b.a. is a modern energy and telecoms group providing, among other services, electricity, energy optimisation, broadband fibre network and cable TV to more than 700,000 consumers. SE Group has roots in both Southern Denmark and Northern Jutland where the company has 316,000 shareholders but the company's approx. 1,500 employees operate from different locations throughout Denmark.

Around 700 of the employees are working hard every day at Stofa (owned by SE) to offer consumers even better digital services. Together with Stofa's TV, broadband and mobile consumers, the aim is to make Denmark a digital winner nation.

SE's vision is to become the most value-creating player in the Danish energy and telecoms sector and to help create a sustainable knowledge-based society. In this context, SE invests massively in digital infrastructure.