BOSTON – In an unusual move, top technologists from the cable industry’s three most prominent competing equipment suppliers – Cisco Systems, Motorola Mobility and Arris – have teamed up to revamp the industry’s broadband DOCSIS platform and eventually generate much faster data transmission speeds of 10 Gbps in the downstream and 2 Gbps in the upstream.
If the goal is achieved, this upgrade would easily exceed the speed and bandwidth limits of the latest generation of DOCSIS 3.0 technology now available. At the Cable Show here this week, for instance, Intel showed off its new Puma6 family of silicon chips, including a "media gateway" configuration that bonds 24 downstream channels and eight upstream channels – enough to produce speed bursts of almost 1 Gbps downstream and 320 Mbps upstream.
John Chapman, CTO of Cisco's cable access business unit, presented the new DOCSIS expansion plan here Tuesday, offering a condensed version of a 182-page paper that the three competing vendors co-wrote. As stated, the paper’s aim was to offer recommendations for developing a new generation of DOCSIS devices as cable operators begin converting all of their services to IP technology.
All three suppliers, however, also have a vested interest in protecting their dominance of the DOCSIS cable modem and CMTS equipment markets as other potential technical options start to emerge. In particular, the list of options includes EpoC (which is EPON [Ethernet Passive Optical Network] Protocol over Coax), a proposed standard from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) that would bring PON-like speeds to cable’s hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks.
The three main cable vendors spelled out 10 areas of consensus that they believe could begin to redefine the platform DOCSIS and create a roadmap for it to match the types of speeds designed for EPoC. Among other things, they called for beefing up cable's skinny upstream path by doubling the usable upstream spectrum, managing the downstream spectrum with such tools as switched digital video (SDV) and H.264, upgrading the cable plant to 1GHz and beyond, and upgrading to higher orders of modulation.
In his show presentation, Chapman didn't take any direct shots at EPoC. But he did call DOCSIS "the most successful Ethernet-over-coax technology to date." He also contended that DOCSIS can be molded 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. "DOCSIS can be anything the DOCSIS community wants or needs it to be," he said.
The move comes as CableLabs is reportedly working on a new broadband specification that would succeed DOCSIS 3.0 and pack more muscle for cable's relatively weak upstream. In a video webcast last week, Cisco executives alluded to that project as "DOCSIS 3.x" and "DOCSIS 3.1," noting that part of the project involves using more effective modulation schemes.
CableLabs has not publicly acknowledged that it is working on any new DOCSIS spec. Following the webcast, Cisco officials issued an e-mail statement to Light Reading Cable, which first reported this story, seeking to clarify their position. While admitting that it “has 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.”
– Cartt.ca staff
