Top Cable Tech Suppliers Team Up to Push New DOCSIS Standard
Senior engineers from cable’s three largest equipment suppliers, in a highly unusual move for the rivals, are banding together to update the industry’s broadband platform, so it can produce much higher data speeds than current DOCSIS 3.0 technology can support. Executives from Arris, Cisco and Google’s Motorola Mobility say they're jointly promoting upgrades to the DOCSIS protocol and related areas that could enable cable operators to deliver broadband speeds as high as 10 Gbps downstream and 2 Gbps up. That would be about 100 times faster than what most operators can deliver now over DOCSIS 3.0 networks.
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The proposed refresh of the DOCSIS platform would easily exceed the speed and bandwidth limits of the new breed of DOCSIS 3.0 products that are beginning to hit the market. At the Cable Show in Boston last month, Intel showed off its new Puma6 family of silicon chips, including a “media gateway” design that can logically bond together 24 downstream channels and eight upstream channels. Using this channel-bonding configuration, cable operators could generate speed bursts of almost 1 Gbps downstream and 320 Mbps up, much faster than they can generate now but still no match for what the consumer electronics’ technologists envision.
John Chapman, chief technology officer of Cisco’s cable access business unit, presented the DOCSIS overhaul plan at the NCTA-sponsored show, offering a shortened version of the 182-page paper that the three competing vendors co-wrote. Chapman, considered one of the creators of the original DOCSIS standard 15 years ago, said the idea is to recommend ways to create a next generation of DOCSIS devices as cable operators begin upgrading all of their services to Internet Protocol technology. The three incumbent vendors all have their eye on Ethernet passive optical network protocol over coax (EPoC), a developing proposal at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that would supersede DOCSIS and bring symmetrical, PON-like speeds of 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to cable’s hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks (CD May 10 p7).
CableLabs is developing a new broadband specification that would succeed the current DOCSIS 3.0 standard and provide a big boost for cable’s relatively weak upstream spectrum, industry officials said. Cisco executives in a recent webcast by the company alluded to this spec development effort as “DOCSIS 3.x” and “DOCSIS 3.1,” although it has no official name yet. Without disclosing many specifics about the proposed spec, also known as DOCSIS NG, Cisco officials hinted that it would involve using more effective modulation schemes, among other things.
CableLabs is “continually looking at emerging technologies and updates to our specifications, including the DOCSIS 3.0 specification,” the industry consortium said. Cisco noted in a written statement after its webcast that it’s “advocated for the creation of a new version of the DOCSIS specifications.” The company apologized for “any confusion that we may have caused in our implying that there are any future or successive versions of CableLabs’ DOCSIS specifications currently being written.” CableLabs hasn’t explicitly acknowledged if there’s a DOCSIS 3.x project, and a spokeswoman had no further comment for this report.
Telcos that sell video are using fiber-to-the-home technology to try to trump cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 efforts by delivering even faster broadband speeds. Verizon last week said it will soon start offering broadband speeds as high as 300 Mbps down and 150 Mbps upstream under its FiOS Internet product umbrella. Verizon now offers top data transmission speeds of 150 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps up. The telco said (http://xrl.us/bm93ne) the speed increases are designed to address “the burgeoning growth of bandwidth-intensive applications,” “the increase in the number of Internet-connected devices being used simultaneously in the same household,” the growing consumption of “over-the-top video programming on TVs and portable devices” and “the rise in Internet-enabled applications like video and audio streaming, home monitoring devices, video chat, multiplayer gaming and online backup services."
In their joint presentation in Boston last month, the Cisco, Motorola and Arris engineers spelled out 10 areas of consensus they believe could begin to redefine the DOCSIS standard and create a road map for matching the types of speeds that EPoC envisions. They called for beefing up cable’s skinny upstream path by doubling the industry’s usable upstream spectrum from the current 5MHz to 42MHz range to 5MHz to 85MHz and managing the downstream spectrum more efficiently with such tools as switched digital video and H.264. They also called for upgrading cable plant capacity to 1GHz and beyond and using higher frequency modulations to boost the number of bits per hertz that could be carried over cable’s HFC lines.
Chapman didn’t directly criticize EPoC, gathering steam among leading cable operators and equipment vendors seeking to crack the cable broadband market. He argued that DOCSIS has been “the most successful Ethernet-over-coax technology to date.” DOCSIS can be reshaped into a platform that can handle cable’s future performance requirements, as long as the industry commits to the new roadmap and starts working on it soon, he said. “DOCSIS can be anything the DOCSIS community wants or needs it to be.”