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
Comcast announced Thursday that it has rolled out its DOCSIS 3.0 service to four more markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The company now offers wideband services in 10 cities. Comcast claims it now reaches 20 percent of its customer base with the addition of those four markets and by the end of December, 10 million homes and businesses in each of the cities will be able to sign up for the service.
MapQuest was busy Thursday announcing the launch of two new widgets for Twitter and CareerBuilder users. According to the company, its Twitter widget on MapQuest Local will allow users to see what Twitter users are talking about in their city or town. For any city a user displays on the MapQuest site, a Twitter link will be displayed showing Twitter entries made by people in that area and a link to reply to or follow that person’s stream. MapQuest’s new Careers widget will store up to five different sets of search keywords and pull in job matches in an area the person is mapping. Both widgets are available now on MapQuest Local.
Online casual gaming service Outspark announced Thursday that it has officially launched a portal on its page that will allow its community of users to interact with each other by creating profiles and become friends to share user-generated videos. The company also announced that it’s now using the open application programming interface from YouTube to host and embed user-generated videos directly on its own site.
Blog publishing service Tumblr announced Thursday that it raised $4.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. The company’s executives said they will use the funding to bolster cash reserves over the next few years and deploy paid features to increase revenue.
Domain squatters acquired the domain name GeorgeWBushLibrary.com recently and sold it back to Yuma Solutions, the Web development company that forgot to renew it, for a profit of $34,990. Yuma originally purchased the domain name in 2007 for $3,000.
source: news.cnet.com
Charter is also moving ahead with a bandwidth management plan that will involve both switched digital video (SDV) and analog reclamation to make room for high-definition television (HDTV) and Docsis 3.0 services.
Today, Charter’s top-end 16 Mbit/s service is available to about 80 percent of its Docsis footprint. Docsis 3.0 uses channel bonding techniques to produce shared speeds in excess of 100 Mbit/s.
“We are rolling [Docsis 3.0] out in the second half of the year, [but] we haven’t yet announced which markets,” Smit said, noting that Charter has already rolled those dollars into its overall capex number for 2008, estimated to reach $1.2 billion.
Charter is already testing SDV in Los Angeles using the BigBand Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: BBND) platform and expects to begin broader deployments later this year. (See Charter Charts First SDV Course .)
Smit said Charter will use “low-cost set-tops” to aid its all-digital effort, but he did not specify whether it will use DTAs.
Smit said the MSO also expects to migrate to all-digital in markets with the highest digital penetration. Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), by way of example, expects to enlist its all-digital strategy in 20 percent of its markets by year’s end. Comcast is using simple digital terminal adapters (DTAs) to help with the strategy. (See DTAs on Parade .)
source: lightreading.com
To compete with Verizon’s FiOS service, the New York-based ISP intends on doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi wireless Internet service to 3Mbps, which will be free for Cablevision subscribers. As a comparison, the FiOS service runs about $140 per month, while other competing companies such as Comcast and Charter only offer a more costly 50Mbps.
Cablevision announced today a plan that will bring speeds of 101Mb/s downstream and 15Mbps upstream to its 3 million customers. To take advantage of the new service, subscribers will be given the option to upgrade their cable Internet to DOCSIS 3.0 for $99.95 per month. The high-speed Internet access is expected to deliver full-length high-definition movies in less than 10 minutes or upload 750 digital photos or 150 songs in one minute.
source: techspot.com
Cisco Systems is developing a cable modem that will use Broadcom’s recently announced DOCSIS 3.0 silicon to bond together eight downstream channels – letting cable providers, theoretically, pump Internet content down to subscribers at more than 300 Mbps.
The forthcoming unit would be among the first to use Broadcom’s BCM3380 DOCSIS 3.0 modem chip. Cisco also plans to incorporate Broadcom’s DOCSIS 3.0 physical layer (PHY) component in its next-generation cable modem termination system (CMTS).
Cisco has predicted that the annual bandwidth demand on the world’s Internet networks will nearly double every two years — reaching 522 Exabytes annually in 2012 (the equivalent of 250 million DVDs) — and that half of that will be video traffic.
He noted, however, that right now Cisco is not exactly sure how the cost of the DPC3212 cable modem would compare with current DOCSIS 3.0 models.
Cisco is currently shipping two DOCSIS 3.0 customer-premises products, the DPC3000 cable modem and DPC3202 eMTA, which both use Texas Instruments’ Puma 5 chip set.
The driving force in the future for higher-speed broadband will be video over DOCSIS — whether that’s managed video content or unmanaged content going over the top, Bekele said.
“That’s going to make it more likely that operators will push the tiers higher,” Bekele said. “That ability to leapfrog to eight channels definitely becomes an advantage.”
According to Bekele, the idea with the eight-downstream-channel devices is to let cable operators future-proof their installed base of DOCSIS modems. So while a cable operator wouldn’t necessarily introduce a 300-Mbps Internet tier initially, that latent capacity would be available down the line.“As long as the cost is comparable, you’ll see a lot of operators gravitate toward 8 by 4,” he said, referring to a cable modem that provides eight downstream and four upstream channels.
source: ciscozine.com
Telstra has been quick to respond to criticism of the capabilities of DOCSIS 3.0, and HFC networks in general, with a blog post on Nowwearetalking from its CTO, Hugh Bradlow.
Bradlow was particularly upset about accusations from Optus’ government relations chief, Maha Krishnapillai, who was reported to have described Telstra’s upgrade was a poor second choice because it was a ‘shared network’, and therefore slowed down as the number of users increased.
Well if this is so, given all that Telstra has said about the need for and benefits of widespread high speed broadband one has to ask why it is dipping its toe into the water with DOCSIS 3.0 announcing only a Melbourne rollout when, on a simple extrapolation of the $300m cost, it could have 2.5m households in major cities able to access the network for about $700 and probably finish the job my mid 2010.
You can read Bradlow’s full rap on the wonders of DOCSIS 3.0 on Nowwearetalking. According to Bradlow, it stacks up very favourably against FTTN. “When we say that Telstra’s upgraded cable network will deliver up to 100Mbps downstream speeds, we mean it. Even in peak periods, the cable network will deliver 70 – 100Mbps burst downstream speeds, – a higher peak speed, in fact, than FTTN would offer.”
Dermot Cox of C-COR Broadband – the main supplier of HFC gear to Telstra – made a submission to the Senate enquiry into the NBN. He had the hubris to claim that “The next wave of technology development will be driven by the world’s leading cable operators to meet customers’ increasing demand for more bandwidth and video-centric applications like IPTV, interactive video, distance education and video telephony. Not once did he mention that the capacity of DOCSIS 3.0 is shared between all users on a co-ax cable.
True, but it’s a fact that cable people seem particularly reluctant to discuss. I’d asked Telstra’s GMD Networks and Services, Michael Rocca the day of Telstra’s announcement how many users in Telstra’s Melbourne HFC network typically shared a single run of coax and if Telstra intended to reduce this number as part of the upgrade. I had great difficulty in getting him to answer the question, and he never did give me a number but did say that about 100 addition nodes would be rolled out as part of the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade. According to Bradlow, the number of users per node in HFC networks is “typically 150″ (but he did not suggest that this applied to Telstra’s network).
source: itwire.com
It is not unusual for Microtune to announce new products of this kind, and the announcement of this product, or any other product, should not be viewed as an indicator of Microtune revenues for any current or future reporting period. The market for DOCSIS 3.0 solutions may develop more slowly than currently anticipated. There can be no assurance that Microtune’s DOCSIS 3.0 or other products will continue to be selected by manufacturers in the future to support their cable products. All statements regarding the performance of Microtune products in this release and their performance relative to other products reflect management’s belief as of the date of this release only.
source: corporate-ir.net
For DOCSIS 3.0 applications that require a combination of wideband and narrowband tuners, Microtune offers the MicroTuner(TM) MT2068. It is a low-power, high-performance narrowband tuner that supports multiple specifications (DOCSIS(R), EuroDOCSIS(TM) 2.0 and PacketCable). Drawing less than 900 mWatts of power consumption, the MT2068 is engineered to deliver superior performance and power efficiency for DOCSIS 3.0 voice, Internet and multimedia/video services in all-digital, 1-GHz expanded cable networks.
The MT2170 is a 1.1 GHz single-chip tuner that offers the equivalent functionality of at least four DOCSIS 2.0 narrowband tuners in a highly integrated miniature package. It supports DOCSIS 3.0 channel bonding technology and can accept bonded channels within an IF bandwidth range of 96 MHz. The MT2170 is able to process wideband bonded channels in the presence of multiple interfering signals, while at the same time meeting stringent DOCSIS 3.0 sensitivity and adjacent channel interference requirements.
Last year, Microtune introduced the industry’s first wideband TV tuner (MicroTuner(TM) MT2170), and today it is the only cable tuner that has been deployed by OEM manufacturers in DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems and Embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapters (E-MTAs) certified by CableLabs(R).
source: corporate-ir.net