The acquisition of one of the largest suppliers to the cable industry of set-top receivers allows Cisco even further entrance to home markets: The company bought Linksys a few years to get into the consumer play, and its purchase of WLAN switch maker Airespace was originally perceived as just an enterprise entry.
But the Airespace division was key in pushing out Cisco's mesh product line this week, which is aimed at municipal deployment. Witness BelAir's recent announcement of cable-plant compatible mesh Wi-Fi that eliminate the backhaul problem wherever there's a cable line, and Tropos's announced entry in Sept. into cable/mesh products with Scientific-Atlanta is, one might suspect, no longer on the table.
Cisco's current product portfolio could let them easily integrated voice, Wi-Fi, remote management, security for home networks, and end-point CPEs for municipal networks into a single black-box. Wherever there's cable, they can provide a cable-oriented box; where there's not, Wi-Fi-based CPEs with similar utility could come into play. The bandwidth for streaming video over municipal networks certainly isn't there, but Cisco isn't known for a one- or two-year horizon.