Lot of 10G Development Now in Vendors' Hands, CableLabs Says

The science to enable 10G “is well understood,” with development work now largely being done among vendors, CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney said Thursday as it hosted demonstrations of technology under development. The cable industry's 10G won't involve just coaxial cable delivery but "a holistic umbrella" of technologies including fiber and point-to-point coherent optics, said Curtis Knittle, vice president-wired technologies. He said DOCSIS 4.0 will be able to provide multi-gigabit speeds without needing to install fiber infrastructures. DOCSIS 3.1 "has a lot of life left" for delivery of gigabit symmetric service with customer premises equipment. Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications representatives said DOCSIS 4.0 deployment like 3.1, won't involve a big all-at-once swap-out but network enhancements over time. McKinney said CableLabs also is working on fiber, coherent passive optical networks and mobile research, plus development routes for convergence of those technologies that would let operators use those different networks from one platform and pick among those technologies when serving a particular subscriber or geography, he said. Comcast's move to multi-gig synchronous speed "is well underway," CEO Brian Roberts said as he discussed the company's Q1 results (see 2204280004). He said it, Charter Communications and Cox Communications will all offer such capacity to more than 100 million homes over DOCSIS 4.0 infrastructures within a few years. He said Comcast did a variety of 10G equipment tests during the quarter.