DOCSIS 3.1 to offer faster upstream speeds, better product for cablecos

A new cable standard under development in the United States will increase Canadian cablecos' network capacity and transfer speeds, analysts say. In a May 14 webcast, Mark Palazzo, vice-president of Cisco Systems Inc.’s cable access business unit, said Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs), an international coalition of cablecos, is currently developing a new cable specification that is designed to succeed DOCSIS 3.0. “There’s been significant activity over at CableLabs over the last couple months driving towards what’s that next generation of DOCSIS,” Palazzo said. Palazzo said “a lot of the focus” on the new specification, which he referred to as DOCSIS 3.1 or DOCSIS 3.X, centred on improving cablecos’ upstream Internet capacity. Iain Grant, managing director with the Seaboard Group, told The Wire Report in an email this week that CableLabs will aim to increase upstream capacity “both through channel bonding and higher order modulation techniques” Grant said upload speeds have remained mostly dormant in recent years as operators have invested heavily to increase their downstream capacity. “ speeds have risen from 20 Mbps five years ago to over 200 Mbps today, with higher speeds both possible and inevitable,” he wrote. “Upload speeds, by contrast, have barely moved.” Grant said that, five years ago, a cable download speed of 20 Mbps would have been paired with an upload speed of 750 Kbps to 1 Mbps. Upstream speeds have increased since then to about 2 Mbps but said the “asymmetry” between upload and download speeds is “still significant.” Grant said Canadian cablecos are increasingly looking to level the “asymmetric connection” as they compete with faster, fibre-based services offered by telcos like BCE Inc., Telus Corp., and SaskTel. “As telco-based offerings are increasingly available, the asymmetry of the cable offerings becomes a competitive Achilles heel,” he wrote. Bell’s fibre-based Fibe Internet offers residential packages with upload speeds of up to 175 Mbps, the company’s website says. “Fibre optic is the best technology to deliver data, and it has faster upload speeds than any cable product on the market—up to three times better,” Bell’s website says. Roberta Fox, chair and chief innovation officer at consulting firm Fox Group Technology, said in an interview that consumers’ increasing use of online services like video-conferencing is pushing Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer faster speeds. “If you’re uploading something to YouTube, or if you’re taking a course and you’re uploading it or you’re doing real-time video conferencing, you need to send your image for me to watch,” she said. “That’s where you want it as close to equal up and down speeds that you can get.” She said the new protocol could also improve the options for cable-based Internet protocol TV (IPTV) services. “When you are selecting TV or choosing videos to download, there is also a fair amount of information that goes upstream to select the choice, as well as information that is constantly sent from your computer to the server(s) that is broadcasting the content,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “he better the uplink too, the better the overall end user experience.” At an annual meeting on April 25, Rogers Communications Inc.’s president and CEO, Nadir Mohamed, told shareholders the company is on a “two-year journey” to convert its cable TV network to an all-IPTV network. Bell and Telus already offer IPTV services, and have succeeded in stealing subscribers from cablecos Fox said it is “impossible to predict” when the new DOCSIS standard would be released. Further information about the updated protocol could emerge at an industry conference called the Cable Show in Boston, May 21-23. Alan Breznick, a senior analyst with research group Heavy Reading, said there is no guarantee that cablecos will adopt DOCSIS 3.1. Breznick said DOCSIS, originally developed by CableLabs in the 1990s, has limits to how fast it can transmit data. The cable industry is now at a “crossroads” as it considers whether to push ahead with a new DOCSIS standard or switch to a new protocol altogether, he said. “That’s the big question that has to be resolved,” Breznick said in an interview. “Whether DOCSIS can take the next leap forward and get even faster than it already is, or whether cable operators will have to turn to new architectures and use the PON protocols that the phone companies are looking to use.” According to The Fiber Optic Association Inc., an international nonprofit, a PON system uses a “passive splitter that takes one input and splits it to broadcast signals to many users.” The association said in a reference guide that one set of electronics is paired with an “expensive laser” to broadcast signals to multiple homes. An “inexpensive laser” is used in the home to then send signals back to a central office, the reference guide said. Breznick said PON protocols are currently used with fibre networks, but cable engineers are in the process of drafting another standard that would use an Ethernet-based PON, or EPON. Once drafted, engineers would present the new standard to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for certification, he said. The Fiber Optic Association’s reference guide says EPON is based on the IEEE standard for Ethernet in the first mile. EPON uses “packet-based transmission at 1 Gbps with 10 Gbps under discussion,” the reference guide says. “EPON is done over fibre, but nobody’s done it over coaxial cable yet,” Breznick said. “There are different versions of where cable’s future is going to go and that’s something that’s going to be the big question over the next couple of years,” he said. CableLabs declined to comment on any new DOCSIS specifications. “CableLabs is continually looking at emerging technologies and updates to our specifications including the DOCSIS 3.0 specification, but we have nothing specific to discuss at this time,” the company said in an emailed statement. dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

DOCSIS 3.1 to offer faster upstream speeds, better product for cablecos

News | May 22, 2012

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