Fast Net News, DSL Prime, DOCSIS Report

Tony Werner, Comcast CTO, told me at the cable show he intended to go into production with upstream DOCSIS 3.0 the first quarter of 2010. The schedule has slipped slightly, but Chris Bastian reports field trials "have produced sustained rates of 75 Mbit/s" (shared). Cox is also in trials, and Balin Nair of Liberty Global tells me his networks are ready as well. The broadband planners heard from the cable engineers what was coming and promised "100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual upload speeds of 20 Mbps." Cable said they will have near 100% 20 megabit coverage by 2015, but most areas will be reached much sooner. They also confirmed 50 meg upstream to 100M homes later on, which implies an upgrade of DOCSIS 3.0 system mid-decade.

       Bob McIntyre of Scientific-Atlanta (now Cisco) and Brian Roberts both expected upstream as well as downstream DOCSIS 3.0 in 2007, but the first products didn't ship until 2009. SK Broadband in highly competitive Korea went into production in 2009, but the slow DSL upstreams in the U.S. and Western Europe have allowed cablecos to go slowly.

       Minimum upstream DOCSIS 3.0 is four bonded channels with a theoretical capacity of 120 megabits or more. In practice, the upstream runs at low frequencies where there is a great deal more noise. Jeff Baumgartner is optimistic that the more advanced S-CDMA modulation, announced by Motorola, will go well over 100 megabits.