User Manual

Installation Guide
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To ensure compliance with FCC recommended Occupational/Controlled exposure limits,
field engineers and technicians should maintain a minimum working distance of six
inches, as measured from the front of the Hub or CPE to the front of their bodies. For
working distance inside six inches, RF exposure should be limited to an average of 30
minutes at a time. All Arcwave equipment, however, has been designed to allow
installation and maintenance at a range well within FCC RF exposure levels.
DOCSIS Network Considerations
Embedded Cable Modem Operation
The ARCXtend Hub contains an embedded cable modem for remote management of the
hub via the DOCSIS network, obtaining the DOCSIS operating parameters needed to
program the hub and monitoring input RF signal level and quality. The embedded cable
modem is identical in operation to a customer cable modem and requires Internet
Protocol (IP) connectivity.
Setup
Prior to deployment of the ARCXtend solution, the embedded cable mode configuration
file and firmware must be loaded on the TFTP server. The configuration and firmware
files are included on the documentation CD shipped with each hub and can be
downloaded from the Support Extranet, http://www.arcwaveinc.com/support.html.
The configuration file provided by Arcwave contains the necessary modem specific
information required to do firmware downloads.
Before an individual hub can be assigned an IP address its MAC address must be
provisioned in the DHCP server. If the MAC address is not provisioned prior to
deployment, most likely the embedded cable modem will receive a default configuration
with Network Access set to “disable”. The Ethernet MAC address of the embedded cable
modem is located on a label on the back of each hub.
Load Balancing Groups
Currently, the ARCXtend solution does not support upstream shared spectrum (aka load
balancing) groups where the cable modem(s) can be moved from one upstream frequency
to another based on plant conditions. Both the customer cable modem and the cable
modem located inside the hub must be explicitly excluded from this feature. This is
usually accomplished by putting the MAC addresses of both in an exclusion list kept by
the CMTS.