DOCSIS 3.0 moves the shared upstream from 6-28 megabits to 120 megabits. It’s already built in to all DOCSIS 3.0 modems DOCSIS is designed to deliver 50 up 50 down 95+% of the time. 4-12+ times as fast in raw speed. The real difference is likely to be higher, as congestion peaks tend to even out with more raw speed. Few really need that speed, but nobody really needs a BMW either. The evidence is overwhelming that almost all customers prefer high speeds if the price is similar, while a significant minority will pay substantially more.
Cablecos fighting DSL will have a huge advantage. Cablecos facing Verizon will need 3.0 upstream to compete with GPON designed to go up to 200 meg symmetrical, and even BPON is 155 meg shared. Ivan Seidenberg is spending $23B for FIOS. He’s told me “we need to get cable out of the house.”
He’s already selling 20 meg upstreams when few cablecos even offer 5 meg. In New York City, it will be almost exclusively GPON and he’ll rapidly offer higher speeds.
Facing AT&T, Qwest, and Bell Canada, the 50 meg of 3.0 upstream will provide an enormous advantage compared to the 1 meg of DSL from the node. 100 meg DOCSIS is selling for $25-40 in Japan and France as part of the bundle. Any cableco who prices like that should knock out a telco without fiber. Other carriers will decide to reserve the high speeds for more expensive tiers, directly improving profit.
Besides blowing away DSL 1 meg upstream, it also should essentially solve the congestion on the cable upstream. That’s a far better solution than throttling or capping.
The tech community has realized DOCSIS 3.0 is much faster than DSL since about 2003. DSL like AT&T is delivering 1 up, 10 down, 50-98% slower. The telcos sticking with DSL for the last mile will have a major technical disadvantage for the next decade. If customers desert in droves for the higher speeds (unproven, especially if they are priced high,) it would take years to move to full fiber.
source: dslprime.com
RCN Corp. is speeding toward its first DOCSIS 3.0 broadband service rollout, but that first product may not be aimed at the residential customer, President and CEO Peter Aquino told a group of analysts and investors at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media and Telecommunications Conference Tuesday.
Aquino echoed gave a quick update on the DOCSIS 3.0 rollout, saying that with systems now being tested in New York and Boston, a DOCSIS 3.0 rollout was coming within a couple of months, “if not weeks.”
But at launch RCN may be focusing the service marketing on small to medium business customers rather than residential.
Aquino said less than 20% of RCN’s data customer base takes its top-tier 20 Mbps service “and applications for 20 Meg – it’s not mass market yet. So now you’ve got 50. So what are you going to do with 50 if you are not using 20?”
Instead, Aquino said RCN might be better off aiming its initial DOCSIS 3.0 rollout at the small business segment.
“I think that’s where we can get our bang for the buck,” he said. “I think from the consumer perspective, it’s going to catch up. But I think in 2009 DOCSIS 3.0 I’m not going to see a big migration from 10, 15, 20 Meg product to 50 just because we have it.”
“I don’t think the demand is there, personally,” he said. “But the technology is there, and we are aiming for the future. I think we aim for small biz, and to the extent there are certain consumers who want that type of power, we’re going to have it.”
During the session, Aquino also was asked about merger and acquisition possibilities, and for the first time opened the door – if slightly – to the idea of selling off the cabler’s network and franchises in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. The valley, which includes the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem, Pa. and Easton, N.J. is the third highest concentration of population in Pennsylvania behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with about 790,000 residents.
The Lehigh Valley is the only one of RCN’s markets that is not a high-density urban market. While it has a fully built-out 860 MHz cable plant, it is the only RCN market that has not as yet seen rollout of the cabler’s Analog Crush all-digital TV service.
When asked what RCN’s plans were for the market, Aquino said all options were on the table.
“Monetizing is an option, but it is not high up on my list,” Aquino said. “If it happens it will be opportunistic and we will see. But Lehigh Valley is real engine for us. It’s a great market for us and the employees are really strong, and it has a great opportunity for expansion, whether you go into south Jersey or north of Lehigh.”
source: onetrak.com
Cable operators across the U.S. provide high-speed Internet access to their customers through a broadband connection via a cable modem. These modems are based on DOCSIS technology, or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications. In America today, more than 25 million people access the Internet using DOCSIS-based modems for their cable broadband connections.
DOCSIS has had four successive versions to date, each version providing improved broadband Internet connectivity, security features, quality, reliability, and flexibility. DOCSIS 3.0 makes it possible for cable operators to offer Internet connection speeds at hundreds of megabits and, potentially, hundreds of gigabits per second.
With Americans taking advantage of their cable broadband connections for surfing, online games, MMORPGS, videos, photos, music, and much more, DOCSIS 3.0 and cable wideband connections will no doubt become increasingly popular today’s home Internet user.
source: cable-modem.net
HERNDON, VA, Feb 10, 2009 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX News Network) — RCN Corporation (NASDAQ: RCNI), a leading provider of all-digital and high definition video, high-speed internet, and premium voice services to residential and small-medium business customers, as well as high-capacity transport services to carrier and large enterprise customers, announced today that it has begun deployment of DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0. This deployment will enable the company to offer residential and business customers Internet download speeds of 50mbps and faster.
With the completion of its conversion to all-digital cable TV in its major metropolitan markets, RCN now turns its focus to deploying DOCSIS 3.0, starting with testing and subsequent initial deployments in its Boston and New York City markets. DOCSIS 3.0 is designed to help cable providers, like RCN, to dramatically boost speeds using channel bonding technology.
“Once we have completed our initial testing and trials, we intend to move quickly, similar to our industry leading efforts to deploy an all-digital video platform, to roll this product upgrade out to our data customers,” said RCN President & CEO Peter Aquino. “We’re taking the time now to test the platform to ensure that when we fully deploy this upgrade, it is done in the most efficient and effective manner for our customers.”
Aquino added that on the small business side, DOCSIS 3.0 will enable customers to leverage 2-Megabit and higher symmetrical data services for increased productivity, in-house/on-site hosting and VoIP adoption, all at more attractive prices than the slower T1 service offered by incumbent providers.
source: investor.rcn.com
This week we’ve been looking at why cable companies are kicking the tires on fiber-based passive optical networks, even though they have a heavy investment in hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks. Today, we’ll look at the DOCSIS architecture and its skinny upstream data path, and how this decreases the longevity of the DOCSIS architecture.
I’m going to condense a whole lot of history and summarize a lot of detail in only a couple paragraphs, so if I leave out some details you are looking for, please comment on this post and I’ll circle back to try to get answers in future posts.
When looking at the DOCSIS architecture as defined by CableLabs, it is important to remember that DOCSIS was rooted in the history of broadcast television networks. Cable networks were originally designed for one thing: distributed television signals in one direction – from the headend (imagine it as a bunch of electronic gear sitting beside a big satellite dish picking up a bunch of television signals) downstream to your house. Originally, the main reason to have a return (upstream) path at all was to allow network elements to report errors and anomolies back to a network management system, so not a lot of bandwidth was necessary for the upstream direction.
Since the cable networks were designed to distribute TV signals, they were designed just like over-the-air broadcast television signals, using radio frequency spectrum in 6 MHz channel sizes. A typical HFC plant is designed around 870 MHz of radio frequency spectrum, with 800 MHz of the spectrum allocated for downstream TV channels. The bottom of the spectrum is used for upstream capacity, but a lot of the bottom part of the spectrum is allocated for the DOCSIS operating system, and some of the rest is poor quality spectrum and unusable for data services. In the end, only about 20 MHz is used for the upstream data channel in a DOCSIS 2.0 deployment. That amounts to about 80 Mbps of upstream bandwidth to be shared across 250 customers per node, or about 320 Kbps per customer. If there are 500 customers on your node, then your upstream bandwidth is about 160 Kbps.
That’s not a lot of bandwidth in the upstream direction, so you can understand why cable companies are very concerned about applications like BitTorrent that use tons of upstream capacity. These kinds of peer-to-peer applications work much better when there is a bunch of upstream capacity available. On an upstream-constrained cable network, peer-to-peer applications have the potential to suck up all of the already-limited upstream capacity.
DOCSIS 3.0 was supposed to help with this problem by allowing multiple channels to be “bonded”, so that bandwidth can be multiplied. However, in an effort to accelerate DOCSIS 3.0 certification efforts, the cable industry deferred upstream channel bonding certification til 2009, so that they could provide downstream channel bonded services earlier in 2008. What that means is that in 2008 the top downstream speed may be able to hit 160 Mbps under ideal conditions, but the upstream speeds are still stuck at DOCSIS 2.0 speeds.
Also, while DOCSIS 3.0 grabs headlines with numbers like 160 Mbps or 100 Mbps downstream, it is likely that this capacity will be shared across multiple customers, just like today’s cable Internet services, so a cable customer may not really be able to buy a service as fast as 160 Mbps downstream.
So, in 2008 at least, while a Verizon FiOS customer is enjoying a 5 Mbps upstream connection, a cable customer is likely to be stuck with a 360 Kbps upstream connection, even on DOCSIS 3.0. It won’t be til sometime in 2009 that the cable customer really starts to see upstream speeds on par with Verizon FiOS.
As time goes on, even with DOCSIS 3.0, the upstream direction is likely to remain the bottleneck in cable Internet services, and it will remain a serious disadvantage for cable Internet service providers until they finally break the tie with HFC architecture.
source: ikeelliott.typepad.com
Industry’s First DOCSIS 3.0 RF Protocol Analyzer Speeds Analysis and Troubleshooting of DOCSIS 3.0
ATLANTA, March 12 – DAQTron, Inc. (www.daqtron.com), the worldwide leader in DOCSIS test systems, announced the immediate availability of the industry’s first DOCSIS 3.0 RF Protocol Analyzer (DP-360) for functional analysis of the upstream and downstream of Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0 signals. Through heavy use of FPGA technology, the DP-360 features four independent downstream and four independent upstream tuners with complete flexibility of channel placement; independent, real-time, upstream and downstream channel filtering on DOCSIS message types and MAC addresses; and full support for four or more bonded channels.
“The DP-360 is the latest in a long line of DOCSIS RF protocol analyzers from DAQTron,” said Joseph Kovacs, Vice President of Marketing for DAQTron. “The DP-360 is already in use by leading DOCSIS equipment and product certification companies and is speeding up the identification and location of trouble spots by providing visibility into all layers of the DOCSIS network. This will also greatly assist service providers in troubleshooting their HFC networks as they deploy DOCSIS 3.0 bonded channel equipment into their plants.”
As a service to its valued customers, DAQTron is now offering a trade-in allowance to all ST-260C (the predecessor to the DP-360) customers. The DP-360 supports all of the features of the ST-260C which includes DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and now 3.0.
source: news.thomasnet.com
DAQTron, Inc., Atlanta, the worldwide leader in DOCSIS test systems, has unveiled the industry’s first DOCSIS 3.0 RF Protocol Analyzer (DP-360) for functional analysis of the upstream and downstream of Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0 signals. Through heavy use of FPGA technology, the DP-360 features four independent downstream and four independent upstream tuners with complete flexibility of channel placement; independent, real-time, upstream and downstream channel filtering on DOCSIS message types and MAC addresses; and full support for four or more bonded channels.
“The DP-360 is the latest in a long line of DOCSIS RF protocol analyzers from DAQTron,” said Joseph Kovacs, vice president of Marketing for DAQTron. “The DP-360 is already in use by leading DOCSIS equipment and product certification companies and is speeding up the identification and location of trouble spots by providing visibility into all layers of the DOCSIS network. This will also greatly assist service providers in troubleshooting their HFC networks as they deploy DOCSIS 3.0 bonded channel equipment into their plants.”
As a service to its valued customers, DAQTron is now offering a trade-in allowance to all ST-260C (the predecessor to the DP-360) customers. The DP-360 supports all of the features of the ST-260C which includes DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and now 3.0.
source: entrepreneur.com
At an earnings conference on Wednesday, Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs said that the cable provider will begin using the newer, multi-channel DOCSIS 3.0 standard to provide Internet and data access to homes and businesses this summer, although it will be limited to New York City only. Time Warner Cable is currently testing DOCSIS 3.0 in NYC, Hobbs says. Testing has netted 138Mbps download speeds and and 18Mbps upload speeds, the COO says, adding that these won’t be offered initially.
Once Time Warner completes the DOCSIS rollout in New York City by year’s end, deployments of the infrastructure in other markets will be “surgical.” New York City is an important market, as competitor Verizon has recently signed a franchise agreement with the city to fully outfit the city with its FiOS fiber-optic infrastructure by 2014.
source: electronista.com
Hoping to provide anxious cablecos with the ability to boost the speed of network services in fierce competition with Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and others, Motorola Inc. on Thursday announced a line of DOCSIS 3.0 CPE.
DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems bond up to four channels to provide downstream speeds of up to 160mbps and upstream speeds of up to 120mbps. Motorola also introduced two modems for digital voice services. The vendor didn’t provide pricing.
DOCSIS 3.0 and related specifications are driven by Cable Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs), the non-profit, research and development unit for cable service providers This spec was issue by the organization last summer.
Motorola archrival Cisco Systems Inc.’s Scientific Atlanta company demoed a DOCSIS 3.0-compliant cable modem at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, for availability sometime this spring.
The Motorola cable modem is available now for certification by top cablecos, said a Motorola spokesperson, who did not have a date for when the unit would be available to others.
Regardless, triple-play providers, including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, have been continually upgrading their Internet access services for the last several months to land new customers and retain current ones.
Top analyst firms such as Infonetics Research, BroadbandTrends.com and In-Stat have all detailed the importance of these offerings.
Cable colossus, and CableLabs’ member, Comcast Corp. has already committed to pass up to 20 percent of customers with DOCSIS services by the end of this year.
The Motorola DOCSIS 3.0 product line includes the SB6120 SURFboard Cable Modem, which provides operators throughput approximating 160mbps without the need for a hybrid fiber/coax plant upgrade.
The cable modem supports all DOCSIS 3.0 features including channel bonding, both IPv4 and IPv6, and advanced encryption services, according to Motorola.
The Motorola trio also includes the SBV6120 and SBV6220 Digital Voice Modems. The first offers one or two lines of digital voice service, while the other offers Lithium-ion battery backup, which provides power during a power outage.
The new units also support DOCSIS 1.X and 2.0 feature sets. Motorola said its DOCSIS 3.0 SURFboard CPE can be self-installed through the products’ rear panel icon and color coding connection guide. Troubleshooting is done via the units’ front-panel operational status LEDs
Monday saw a number of places parade a 160Mbps cable broadband service as the worlds fastest broadband, but we recall there being news of 1Gbps being available in parts of Japan.
KDDI offers a symmetric 1Gbps service for around £40 a month, but it only has limited availability. The news of a 160Mbps connection seems somewhat dull in contrast, but this was picked up due to the service using DOCSIS 3.0 which is the technology Virgin Media is using for its 50Mbps product. Virgin Media has hinted that it can increase speeds, but for this to happen the remaining analogue TV channels will need to be switched off to allow for bonding.
Speeds of 1Gbps into the home while sounding exciting bring other issues. Sharing this between multiple computers can be fun as home routers have trouble coping with 50Mbps connections sometimes and Gigabit network connections on computers are still far from standard. If you use a wireless connection you will also be limited by the speed of this before that of your broadband service. There is also the issue of whether people will ever actually get data at speeds of 1Gbps. Many websites are still hosting on 100Mbps links in datacentres, though the most likely bottleneck will be where 100′s or 1000′s of 1Gbps connections aggregate onto the backhaul network.
For those bemoaning the price of the Virgin Media XXL product at £36 to £50 a month, they can afford to charge a premium price in the UK as they have little competition at this speed point. Hopefully in two years with competition increasing as FTTC appears ,the pricing may be more competitive. Lower pricing is a double edged sword though, as the usual way to lower pricing is to increase contention or introduce other limits.
source: thinkbroadband.com