Thinking about the future of cable broadband

The Ultimate Cable Modem [Light Reading - The Bauminator]

Many cable operators are in the process of upgrading broadband systems and customers' modems to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, offering speeds between 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps downstream. But even as the cable industry is rolling out these blazing fast broadband speeds, there are those in the industry's R&D field that are working on the next step up in broadband speeds. At the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing Summit (CTAM) in Denver yesterday, Jeff Baumgartner reports on vendor plans for DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem configurations that could provide broadband speeds downstream in excess of one gigabit per second.

It works like this - the basic DOCSIS 3.0 standard requires that a cable modem be able to bond 4 channels. At those specs, a cable modem can provide speeds greater than 100 Mbps in both directions. At CTAM, Baumgartner ran into a vendor that is working on bonding 8 and 16 channels downstream. According to Baumgartner, 16 bonded channels would provide for 640 Mbps downstream. And in extreme case, the vendor indicated he had seen a request that would 32 bonded downstream channels that would allow 1.2 Gbps of data to flow downstream. Speeds that fast might mean its time for a new ethernet card capable of bringing those speeds into a computer.

Here at Insight, we're planning for DOCSIS 3.0 speeds, but this article reminds me that we're still not close to maxing out the potential of today's cable technology to deliver the super-fast broadband speeds of the future.

Now all we have to figure out is what to do with all that speed.

Comments

[mike lazfsh]

I think Eric Schmidt knows:

-Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-10-28-n82.html

[mike lazfsh]

That is Eric Schmidt knows what we will do with all that speed. Although I don't know what that means for Television, I bet he is right.

[ARGO]

This cable communism will have to stop at some point or we'll be bailing out 'too big to fail' cable companies.