Cablecos Accelerate DOCSIS 3.0 in Move to Gain ‘High Ground’

Comcast Corp.’s CEO Brian Roberts earlier this week at The Cable Show demoed an ultra broadband data service with speeds in the 150mbps range, causing the show's attendees to wonder just when that kind of bandwidth would be commercially available on a mass-market basis.

Wednesday morning Roberts’ senior vice president of new media development, Steve Craddock, tried to address that question.

The Roberts’ demo was based on DOCSIS 3.0, a CableLabs’ spec that uses channel bonding to achieve much larger up and down stream bandwidth than DOCSIS 2.0, on which the cableco’s current high-speed services are based. The peak downstream for 3.0 is around 160mbps while the peak upstream is about 120mpbs, according to CableLabs.

Beyond delivering greater upstream and downstream rates, however, DOCSIS 3.0 also offers IPv6, endpoint addressing and a very broad array of other functionality.

But rather than wait for 2009 or 2010 until full DOCSIS 3.0 equipment is available, Craddock and his crew at Comcast are pushing the vendor community to submit their gear for 3.0 certification now in hopes of having full- and pre-DOCSIS 3.0 gear available in the 2008-09 timeframe.

At Comcast’s behest, the large cablecos met with vendors last September so the equipment companies could review their DOCSIS 3.0 road maps, but it wasn’t especially promising, said Craddock. So Comcast put together a DOCSIS 3.0 acceleration team, including folks from the business and engineering sides of its organization. That team is working with vendors one on one to try and get them to accelerate their equipment development and certification schedules, he said, which Comcast is hoping to bump up 12 to 15 months from the original CableLabs DOCSIS 3.0 timeline.

Comcast wants to bump up the schedule because it needs to scale. So rather than do that with nodes splits, which are expensive, it would rather do it via an early move to DOCSIS 3.0, said Craddock.

Peter Percosan, director of broadband strategy for TI, is the key vendor championing this acceleration along with Comcast, with the support of the other major cablecos and various other vendors. Real DOCSIS 3.0 products should be ramping in January 2008, said Percosan, who along with Craddock and executives from two European cablecos, Cox and Time Warner Cable, were at a breakfast panel Wednesday talking about their support for this effort.

Because DOCSIS 3.0 is such a big, feature-rich spec, Comcast prioritized the most important functions for the vendor community so if they are not ready for full DOCSIS 3.0 compliance testing, they can offer certification gear with more limited functionality like the large upstream bandwidth and IPv6, said Craddock. However, there is a “sunset date” on the pre-DOCSIS 3.0 gear to become fully compliant with the standard, added Craddock, and that will be in March 2009.

“The timing that Steve described, at least for Cox, is very comfortable,” said Jay Rolls, senior vice president of Cox. He added that in the meantime, Cox is offering select customers the ability to temporarily up their bandwidth with its new “Power Boost” functionality. Craddock tells xchange that Comcast developed that capability and offers it as well, but on a more widespread basis.

Of course, the high bandwidth that pre- and full-DOCSIS 3.0 will enable will allow cablecos to better support the newer, bandwidth-hungry consumer applications like video, social networking, gaming and other rich media. It also will be key in helping cablecos target business customers, particularly the upstream bandwidth functionality, said Craddock.

The cablecos feel that DOCSIS 3.0 will position them well against Verizon, which is taking fiber all the way to the home in select areas as part of its FiOS project, and AT&T Inc. with its DSL/DVS and VDSL/FTTN strategies. Craddock said DOCSIS 3.0 can be used to blanket the United States for a couple billion dollars. Verizon is spending 10-times that and will cover only about 14 percent of the country.

“FiOS is something my grandson needs to worry about, not me,” he said.

“I think we can use DOCSIS 3.0 offensively … grabbing the high ground early,” he continued.

So will the cablecos ever take fiber all the way home?

“We may do all fiber, we don’t know, but we don’t need to do it any time soon,” said Craddock, adding the only exception might be greenfields in which communities are asking for all fiber.

AT&T Inc. www.att.com
CableLabs www.cablelabs.com
Comcast Corp. www.comcast.com
Cox Communications Inc. www.cox.net
TI www.ti.com
Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com

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