Cisco stopped taking direct orders for its flagship cBR-8 cable modem termination system on April 11, 2026, and will ship the final unit on July 11, 2026, milestones that force a still-significant subset of cable operators to choose between virtual CMTS migration, squeezing more life from their chassis, or a leap to PON.

The final deadlines run further out. Operators have until July 10, 2030, to extend or renew service contracts, and the last date of support is April 30, 2031. "After this date, all support services for the product are unavailable, and the product becomes obsolete," Cisco's end-of-life notice states. Cisco disclosed the EOL process in April 2025.

Launched officially in May 2015 under the code name "Battlestar," the chassis-based cBR-8 succeeded the uBR10012 (itself obsolete since May 2017) and served as a converged cable access platform supporting both DOCSIS data and cable video. It carried operators pushing toward multi-gigabit and eventually 10-Gig speeds over HFC. Secondary markets remain an option for now: one unit is listed on eBay at $47,900 or best offer, and CompuDevices sells one for $27,724.81.

Who is moving where?

Vendor selections and migrations are already underway across the operator base:

• Comcast is aggressively migrating to a vCMTS.
• Spectrum (the combined Cox Communications and Charter Communications) and Videotron are in the early stages of moving to Vecima Networks' vCMTS.
• Midco, a long-time Cisco customer, has chosen Harmonic's virtualized platform.
• Select Liberty Global systems in Europe are buying a relatively new vCMTS from Vistance Networks/Aurora Networks, formerly CommScope.
• Mediacom Communications has made a vendor selection and is nearing deployment.

Cox had been almost exclusively a Cisco shop for integrated CMTS and remote PHY-based distributed access architecture upgrades. Cisco itself once developed a virtual CMTS but mothballed the project as it exited the cable tech business, having already stopped selling nodes and amplifiers years ago.

Why are some operators delaying the jump?

Rising memory costs are pushing some operators to postpone the vCMTS decision and instead add capacity and licenses to existing integrated platforms, including the cBR-8, an industry source told Light Reading. Commercial off-the-shelf servers and remote PHY devices are becoming more expensive and scarcer as AI data center demand drives up memory prices — and for cable operators those costs bite at scale, since they apply not just to vCMTS servers but to every node in the network.

Tier 1 operators such as Spectrum, Liberty Global and Comcast are not slowing their vCMTS or DAA plans, multiple industry sources said, but some mid-sized operators are running additional analysis on their short-term path. Others are exploring PON or waiting to see whether an emerging 3GHz "optional annex" for DOCSIS 4.0 gains traction.

Does the EOL problem extend beyond Cisco?

Not for now. Aurora Networks has announced no EOL plans for its integrated CMTS lineup — the E6000, originally developed by Arris, and the C100G CCAP, originally from Casa Systems — and continues adding features such as low-latency capabilities to those legacy platforms.

Operators and analysts contacted by Light Reading said the cBR-8 EOL process comes as no surprise and leaves ample decision time. "The writing has been on the wall for some time, especially from a support perspective. So, operators are already evaluating their options," said Jeff Heynen, Dell'Oro Group's VP of broadband access and home networking.

Heynen has raised his 2027 vCMTS revenue forecast to account for operators getting vCMTSs into labs for testing and early deployments. He tempers that projection, though, expecting a number of operators to run the cBR-8 beyond its EOL date — particularly those planning fiber overbuilds rather than HFC upgrades to DOCSIS 3.1+ or DOCSIS 4.0.