TWC No Bandwidth Cap, No Wideband!
I am twice happy that I do not live in an area where Time Warner Rules. But Even if I did, I think I will not be having their internet service that they call broadband. In any case 5GB monthly cap they suggested while back was the crux of road runner crap!
But now they seem to be laying more crap so their customers can stp on. According to Alex Dudley, VP of public relations for Time Warner, the wideband service, DOCSIS 3.0, is on hold because they could not launch tiered pricing. Time Warner planned to roll out both the services at the same time, therefore they are both on hold now.
Dudley on his twitter feed;
“@netpro2k It doesn’t…just that the rollout was scheduled with the trial and now all of it is on hold”
@AlexTWC
He has also mentioned that the biggest cost associated with wideband roll-out is bandwidth allocation. Are sure it is not per house passed? I read some where that it costs us some where around $750 per house passed USA while Japanese do it for $20. I think what they refer to as bandwidth allocation is the infrastructure upgrade. They want you to pay for their network setup? I think the wolf is catching up! source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
All the while, Comcast started rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 last year, announcing this Tuesday that it had expanded into the San Francisco Peninsula. Yes Show them how it is done!
source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Bresnan Communications, the nation’s thirteen largest MSO with 300k subscribers, is preparing for DOCSIS 3.0, but is in no rush. Speaking at Light Reading’s Cable Next-Gen Broadband Strategies Conference, Bresnan VP of strategic engineering Pragash Pillai said DOCSIS 3.0 “is an insurance policy right now.” According to Jeff Baumgartner’s blog, Bresnan is installing a Cisco cable modem termination system (CMTS), the uBR10012, in some of its larger markets with DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities already on board. Pillai cited the high cost of wideband modems as one contributing factor to their cautious approach. Bresnan’s current top broadband speed is 15 Mbps and they seem content with that for now. But competitors beware – they’re baking in the capability and will launch it when the time is right.
source: telecompetitor.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
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
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
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
When integrated into cable subscriber equipment, the new MT1570 upstream amplifier can be matched with any combination of Microtune’s high-performance wideband and narrowband tuners for a flexible DOCSIS 3.0 RF silicon solution. They can be designed into single- or multi-tuner configurations to produce scalable data and IP video pipelines for four-by-four, eight-by-four and larger downstream/upstream solutions. This capability translates into triple-digit speeds from 160-Mbps to 320-Mbps downstream and 120-Mbps upstream. Additional channels can be added to permit cable operators to scale DOCSIS 3.0 services for unique business models and channel allocation plans, while at the same time, supporting legacy cable networks and services.
Microtune products are engineered to significantly reduce the required footprint, power consumption and RF bill of materials cost to achieve unprecedented DOCSIS 3.0 performance. As building-block, future-ready technology, they enable cost-effective implementation of DOCSIS 3.0 cable services, including ultra high-speed data, Internet-Protocol (IP) voice, fast high-definition video-on-demand downloads/uploads, interactive on-line gaming, Internet Protocol (IP) TV video and new commercial services for businesses.
“As DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts begin in the worldwide cable market, our customers are telling us that cable operators are looking for flexible DOCSIS 3.0 implementations,” said James A. Fontaine, Microtune’s President and CEO. “As a result, our customers are designing customer premises equipment that addresses varying DOCSIS 3.0 deployment and service scenarios. They require a broad portfolio of RF solutions to develop a family of DOCSIS 3.0 products, from ultra high-speed data modems to IPTV set-top boxes and high-end gateways. With our combination of wideband/narrowband technologies, we are uniquely positioned to provide them the most advanced, cost-effective and agile RF solutions available, no matter how they decide to implement DOCSIS 3.0.”
“Texas Instruments’ alliance with Microtune provides cable technology manufacturers with the flexibility to develop high-performance DOCSIS 3.0 products that meet the varied voice, video and data demands of consumer and enterprise markets,” said Ran Senderovitz, Texas Instruments’ Digital Connected Home business manager. “Combined with Microtune’s wideband and narrowband tuners and their new upstream amplifier, TI’s industry-leading Puma 5 family of hardware and software solutions support a wide-range of products from DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems to flexible multi-tuner data and video gateway solutions.”
source: corporate-ir.net
PLANO, Texas, Nov 17, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — –Combination of Wideband and Narrowband RF Technology Enables Downstream/Upstream Channel Solutions of Four-by-Four, Eight-by-Four, or Larger for Scalable DOCSIS 3.0 Services
Microtune(R), Inc. (NASDAQ:TUNE) today introduced the MT1570 wideband upstream amplifier, the latest addition to the Company’s portfolio of radio frequency (RF) silicon products supporting the cable industry’s new DOCSIS(R) 3.0 specification. A companion product to Microtune’s DOCSIS(R) wideband and narrowband tuners, the new MT1570 upstream amplifier enables an impressive 120-Mbps upstream pipeline, significantly increasing performance, data rate and reliability for bandwidth-intensive DOCSIS 3.0 services.
The tuner and amplifier constitute the two-way RF gateway for DOCSIS 3.0 downstream and upstream channel-bonded communications. By providing a cost-effective solution for bonding together four upstream channels, the MT1570 completes Microtune’s DOCSIS 3.0 front-end product offering. With its tuner and amplifier portfolio, the Company offers the only one-stop, all-silicon DOCSIS 3.0 RF solutions in production today.
source: corporate-ir.ne