DOCSIS 3.0

[hennessy1]

Any word on when this is suppose to be comming out from the cable companies. I know that verizon has FIOS but I have comcast and am plenty satisfied with the service. But I am wondering when this faster standard is suppose to come out. Also will I have to upgrade anything else besides the modem? I have a 10/100/1000 switch and router. Will there be any other hardware requirements?

 

[spidey07]

The cable companies are testing the modems and termination gear, comcast is going to trial it this year. The only change needed is their equipment and your modem.

 

[hennessy1]

So routers and wireless adapters and switches wont need to be changed for the higher then 10/100 speeds?

 

[qaa541]

I doubt this will be massively deployed anytime soon because it is a big money upgrade requiring both changes on the head end and the CPE side (your modem).

The cable companies will probably not do this move soon unless they have competition forcing them this direction or if some potentially moneymaking service they want to offer requires it.

There are a few deployments in the world already of this technology like in StarHub in Singapore, but the US cable companies will literally drag their feet until they feel they feel at risk of losing money in the long run. Currently I dont think they feel much financial pressure and there are also some technical hurdles they need to address first such as deploying DOCSIS 3.0 on their mixed vendor rollout of headend equipment (e.g. not all manufacturers may have DOCSIS3.0 line cards yet that work to the same level of service).

 

[NickOlsen8390]

Most cable company's aren't maxing out DOCSIS 2.0, I don't think that they will move to 3.0 till they hit the ceiling with 2.0.
And they wont max out 2.0 for awhile, People already think there internet is fast. And if the people don't know much the cable company's can trick the avg consumer. Such as comcast. I had a friend that had comcast and when he would speed test it he would get about 20mbs, so he thought his connection was 20mbs, but comcast just bursts for like 20 seconds then goes back down to there normal 6mbs

 

[hennessy1]

well wats all the hype about then that if they go to 3.0 that they can reach fios speeds? why dont they just do it through 2.0

 

[NickOlsen8390]

Who knows, They could do FIOS speeds with cable, And in places where there is FIOS the local cable does do it. I wish FIOS was here, just because it would make my cable faster. I personally don't really like FIOS, have had bad times with it.
If FIOS came around, they would bump up my cable just to stay competitive.

 

[hennessy1]

True I know what you mean. I rather just have cable up its speeds rather then switching equipment and all that non fun stuff

 

[NickOlsen8390]

Dont get me wrong. If i could afford/get like 100Mb/s fiber from someone like Level 3 or Time warner Telecom I would switch stuff in a second. Really all i would have to change is insted of a cable modem i would have a Gigabit media converter from fiber to gigabit ethernet. I just don't like FIOS

 

[hennessy1]

any specific reason why?

 

[NickOlsen8390]

I would love to have 100Mb/s fiber. I would be hosting game servers and Websites.
Plus it would give me a reason to put a "warning, Fiber optic cable route" poll in my yard, which i already have just for laughs.
What? They were all over the place in orlando, i had to grab one.

 

[qaa541]

Originally posted by: hennessy1
well wats all the hype about then that if they go to 3.0 that they can reach fios speeds? why dont they just do it through 2.0

They don't do it through DOCSIS 2.0 because the technology and the standard were not designed that way.

In simple terms, the original DOCSIS standard was based upon taking a normal 6Mhz analog TV channel and using it for data.

DOCSIS 3.0 improves on this idea by bonding multiple channels together to use at the same time. So in the end you get a rough X*42Mbps where X is the number of channels being bonded and 42 being the rough downstream speed of a single channel.

You need special linecards and new software (and the new DOCSIS 3.0 standard which was only recently ratified last year) in order to do the bonding.

 

[hennessy1]

well im tired of this overseas thing where they can get much much higher speeds then we can at premium prices

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: hennessy1
well im tired of this overseas thing where they can get much much higher speeds then we can at premium prices

Yeah, because gubment should pay for EVERYTHING.

 

[Foxery]

Originally posted by: hennessy1
So routers and wireless adapters and switches wont need to be changed for the higher then 10/100 speeds?

It'll be many more years before residential customers will see speeds over 100mbits. Look at how long it took us to get to 10...

ArsTechnica keeps tabs on the major players, and upcoming standards:
DOCSIS 3.0, possible 100Mbps speeds coming to some Comcast users in 2008

Comcast at CES: 100Mbps connections coming this year

My personal caveates, though, are that
1) Only power users even know what to do with extra bandwidth
2) If Upstream speeds remain severely castrated, all the downstream speed in the world feels like marketing hype.
3) Cable cos want people to embrace watching High Definition video over broadband, but hate customers who actually use large amounts of bandwidth. Hah.

 

[spidey07]

As long as you're staying on their network they can use effective methods to distribute the HD content so that's really a non-issue. It's the peer-2-peer pirating that's really the problem.

 

[440sixpack]

Originally posted by: hennessy1
So routers and wireless adapters and switches wont need to be changed for the higher then 10/100 speeds?

I thought a lot of consumer level routers had problems with the WAN port exceeding 10-15 Mbps, but I could be mistaken on that.