ATLANTA—While Michael Powell absolutely loves the speeds of DOCSIS 3.1, he absolutely hates the name.
Powell, president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), is calling on the cable industry to toss out the DOCSIS moniker for cable’s broadband spec. Speaking at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ (SCTE’s) Cable-Tec Expo show here, he urged cable technologists to adopt a snazzier name and logo for DOCSIS 3.1 to play up its data transmission rates and broadband capacity in a fiercely competitive market where the bar is increasingly being set by Google Fiber and mobile LTE players.
“We need to own this thing and sell this thing with passion and commitment,” he declared in the conference’s opening general session. “We’re in a 4G and 5G world… We need to sell this thing to consumers.”
Fielding questions from Cox Communications CTO Kevin Hart, Powell didn’t offer up a better name for the spec’s latest iteration, DOCSIS 3.1, which CableLabs has just about finished crafting – in record time for deployment. However, Cox President Pat Esser, who happens to be Hart’s boss, had a ready answer available when he introduced the next general session.
“Maybe we’ll call it ‘Powell Broadband,’” Esser quipped. “Michael would like that.”
In the opening session, Powell also called on U.S. cable operators to take more chances, move more swiftly and try harder to innovate. While the industry has accelerated the pace of change and become more competitive since he took over the NCTA two years ago, Powell argued that more must still be done. “Our industry has historically been a little conservative, a little slow on the swing, a little scared to take risks,” he said. “I think sometimes we’re slow on the uptake.”
Powell, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned cable operators that they face their toughest competition yet from such tech heavyweights as Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Sony, Intel and the like. Gazing up Capitol Hill from his Washington, DC office, he said he sees “an army mobilizing” of the wealthiest, smartest, most tech-savvy companies “ready to charge” at cable. “I don’t know one tech company that doesn’t want in on our stuff,” he said.
Even in the face of this stiff competition, Powell insisted that he still likes cable’s chances. He gave much of the credit to such newer technologies as DOCSIS 3.0, DOCSIS 3.1 and cable-enabled WiFi.
To cite one example, Powell said he doesn’t worry about Google Fiber’s 1 Gbps symmetrical speeds too much because cable operators can already come close to offering those speeds with the help of DOCSIS 3.0. Plus, he said, MSOs should be able to exceed those speeds rates once they start rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 in the next couple of years. “I don’t get too flustered about 1Gig or Google Fiber,” he said. With the new DOCSIS 3.1 spec capable of supporting downstream speeds as fast as 10 Gbps and upstream speeds as fast as 2 Gbps, he said, “we’re there and beyond.”
Although he has doubts about whether Google Fiber will emerge as a true nationwide broadband rival for cable, Powell has no doubts that the high bar for broadband speeds will keep rising. He noted that this bar, which was set at 300 Mbps just a year ago and 100 Mbps only two years ago, has now scaled 500 Mbps with Comcast’s recent launch of a 505 Mbps service in its northeastern markets.
“Growing broadband speed and capacity is the reality of the world,” he said. “We’ll have to geometrically increase capacity… In our lifetimes, 10 Gigs will be the Holy Grail.”
– Staff
