CableLabs, the R&D arm of the north American cable industry, has an increasingly broad remit. On the one hand, as cablecos such as the UK’s Virgin Media O2 plot their path away from DOCSIS technologies towards full fiber, CableLabs could see its overall influence diminished. On the other, as more cablecos – again like VMO2 – become part of fixed/mobile operators, it has been active in developing platforms that will enable future converged services. This has seen CableLabs contributing to developments by mobile standards bodies such as 3GPP, as well as devising its own architectures to support multiple access networks including cellular and WiFi. Its latest effort is to launch a series of architectures to support MVNOs in hybrid network…