Already looking beyond DOCSIS 3.0

Looking Beyond DOCSIS 3.0 [Communications Technology]

DOCSIS 3.0 is the ultra fast broadband technology that is beginning to be rolled out by cable operators across the country. Download speeds with DOCSIS 3.0 are being offered by one cable operator at up to 100 Mbps, and higher speeds are theoretically possible. But at a Light Reading DOCSIS 3.0 conference in Denver, Rouzbeh Yassini, CEO of YAS Broadband Ventures and a key developer of the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, says that the industry needs to plan for higher speeds beyond what DOCSIS 3.0 can provide in the upstream. Yassini told the conference that, "Good job, but no cigar yet. Even 35 Mbps upstream is still not enough."  You gotta love this guy!

By today's residential broadband standards, a 100 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps upstream connection is a supersonic connection. I suspect most customers, especially those using HD streaming video and other bandwidth intensive applications would be more than thrilled with those speeds.  Even today's fast speeds are, for the most part, handling all applications, we can think of, with ease.

The cable industry has always been at the forefront of amping up broadband speeds and technology with the various iterations of the DOCSIS standard, developed through the cable industry's research and development consortium, CableLabs. Though cable operators are still testing and beginning the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 speeds, there's no doubt that the cable industry will be putting good thinking behind the next big thing beyond DOCSIS 3.0, upping the ante again. 

Comments

[Mark]

How much bandwidth can cable TV coax carry? With the never-ending demand for bandwidth for both analog cable, digital cable, digital phone, and broadband internet access, will cable companies have to start replacing the coax running to the customer's home to keep up, or will there be enough bandwidth left in the cable transport everything? I'm curious, as I know that phone companies are running fiber directly into customer's homes now to keep up with the demand.

[Derek Licciardi]

The Insight 20.0 service handles everything for me. The 10.0 service could not sustain a Netflix HD Instant Watch movie without ratcheting down quality. Netflix claims to need between 5 and 8 to work properly. 10 couldn't sustain greater than 8 just like 20.0 doesn't get more than 18 - 19 in reality, less when there is heavy network congestion at the shared node.

Downloading 4 streams to HDTVs in my house would theoretically require that 100mbps connection just to handle the HDTV when you include the necessary overhead to handle traffic congestion at the local node.

[Steve Huff]

It would be sweet with the 20.0 if we could pick our upload speed, say have the choice of having 10 down / 10 up or any combination so like you could have 15 down / 5 up or somehting like that.

Or considering they are giving us 20 down 1.5 up through the 1.5 into the equation so we could have 15 down and 6.5 up or somehting. I do a lot of web design work and uploading Video files to servers is such a pain.

[sineswiper]

Mark, you figure that there's a lot of channels on a coax cable. A lot of those are still analog, and the digital channels can work with a lot less bandwidth (compression, etc.). So, if you get rid of the analog channels, then you can use the bandwidth for other things, like cable modems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Speed_Table

According to the table, 8 channels can give you 343Mbps download (on the shared node, but that still gives you fast individual speeds). I'm sure they could give you more, but it all depends on how many HD and digital channels the cable company is going to put on the line.

There's a balance somewhere, but I'd be perfectly happy with 100Mbps downloads for a good while. Maybe at some point, they'll find a way to compress things better.

[Jonathan White]

Ironic that Mr. Wilner finds it so nice that someone is unhappy with 35mbps upload speed, yet doesn't seem to care at all that Insight caps their upload speed at 1-1.5 mbps. I mean, what's the point of having a 20mbps download if you're still uploading like you're on DSL?

The upload cap is one of the many issues I have with my Insight service, but the worst one is the phone service which is awful. Customer service is now effectively a joke with this company. I've had an ongoing issue with my phone/internet since Dec 31st, and it is still not fixed... and we were even told they'd send maintenance and a tech super

As an ex-employee, I have watched Insight go from the being the best cable company in America to effectively becoming Charter Communications. Why Michael?

[bofkentucky]

On the theoretical bandwidth of a cable system today/this year, start with the raw rates in a sealed lab with no interference from outside signals

1Ghz of spectrum on the wire Divided into 6Mhz channels = 166 Channels
Each DOCSIS 3 channel is good for 38Mbit downstream or 27Mbit upstream
DOCSIS3 hardware that will be out in 2009/2010 allows for upto 8 bonded downstreams and 4 bonded upstreams giving you a final calculation of 13 "customers" who would get 304/108 service, about 5.3Gbit/second of aggregate asynchronous bandwidth.

This is purely theoretical mind you, a cable operator still has to fit TV and phone service and monitoring/administrative bandwidth in that same bandwidth from the node to all drops in it's area. For example, 3 uncompressed HDTV signals fit in 2 of those 6Mhz channels.

[David Bottomley]

I agree... 1.5Mbps is extremely low. In today's interactive world where many users upload content- web sites, videos, music, etc. 5-10Mbps should be the minimum upload rate (I say as I sit here for two hours waiting for a video to upload to Youtube on Insight 20.0). This is sad.