ATLANTA—Racing to a finish even faster than it predicted in a “bold” forecast last fall, CableLabs proclaimed Monday that its new DOCSIS 3.1 specification crafted for next-gen cable broadband service will be publicly issued by the end of this month and completed shortly thereafter.
In a DOCSIS 3.1 Engineering Symposium held a day before the opening of the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo convention here, Matthew Schmitt, director of DOCSIS activities for CableLabs, said the new DOCSIS 3.1 specs will be available before the year-end deadline that he publicly set last October. He also said the new broadband specs will fulfill all of the industry's objectives for the upgraded standard.
Specifically, Schmitt said, DOCSIS 3.1 will provide cable operators with much greater bandwidth capacity, enabling them to offer downstream data speeds as high as 10 Gbps and upstream speeds as high as 2 Gbps. In addition, he said, the new spec will significantly cut the cost of each bit delivered to broadband subscribers, as well as offer an effective migration from the earlier DOCSIS specs and the ability to run new technologies and services over existing cable networks.
Appearing on the same symposium panel as Schmitt, leading MSO engineers expressed optimism about deploying DOCSIS 3.1 within the next two years. Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture for Comcast, said cable companies "should put it in the budget for [20]15," based on the discussions that he’s heard about the new spec so far.
Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of strategic architecture for Cox Communications, said the development and deployment schedules for DOCSIS 3.1 gear are really more dependent on the silicon suppliers than cable operators or equipment makers. But he stressed that Cox is willing to do "anything we can do to help," similar to the other major MSOs that have been heavily involved in the spec’s creation.
Howard Pfeffer, senior vice president of Time Warner Cable’s broadband technology group, said DOCSIS 3.1 deployments will likely begin with new cable modems and wireless gateways. He then expects these home devices to be integrated with next-gen Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) equipment, which will combine the functions and features of the cable modem termination system (CMTS) and edge QAM modulator in the cable headend.
Both major equipment suppliers and cable operators have been extensively involved in the development of the DOCSIS 3.1 specs. Symposium speakers argued that this fact, along with the new spec’s backwards compatibility with earlier versions of the DOCSIS standard, should help spur the industry’s deployment of the new broadband technology.
CableLabs engineers have designed the new DOCSIS spec to boost spectral efficiency by as much as 50%. The new standard achieves this feat through several new techniques, including the use of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and a new Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique that allows cable operators to leverage higher order QAM modulations.
One Symposium audience member expressed concerns about the efficiency of the new specs. He said he’s also worried about having to clear more video spectrum so that his company can take advantage of DOCSIS 3.1.
But Finkelstein said these challenges can be overcome. He recommended cable operators reclaim underutilized video bandwidth by continuing to switch from analog video to digital video signals. He also called on operators to weed out their standard-definition video channels and move more high-definition channels over to switched digital video carriage.
– Staff
