Comcast CEO Shows Off Superfast Modem

Gary writes "Comcast CEO dazzled cable industry audience by showcasing a super quick modem, using a technology called DOCSIS 3.0. It was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity enabling a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems. 'The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network already is capable of providing 100 mbps, and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.'"

Technical Mumbo Jumbo

Can someone clarify for the non-technical types (such as myself) what "superfast" actually means?

Re:Technical Mumbo Jumbo

Superfast means it has the ability to go much faster than the undocumented quota that will get a subscriber kicked off the net.

Re:Technical Mumbo Jumbo

It's just a little bit faster than reallyfast and a little bit slower than UBERfast

Re:Technical Mumbo Jumbo

wake me up when they offer ludicrous speed

Re:Technical Mumbo Jumbo

150x faster? My cable modem syncs at 20mbits/second, and so too does the majority of others on the Virgin Media network in the UK.

Upload?

>a data download speed of 150 megabits per second

The article makes no mention of what kind of upstream speeds you'll get with this technology.

More bandwidth, please...

With more and more households pulling down big files, with HDTV starting to take off and the jump in downloads *that* will cause, with more multi-PC homes (four in mine), of COURSE they're going to want more bandwidth.

And until FTTH becomes more prevalent, cable is the best available option.

4 lines = 25 times faster?!

That means 16 cables should be 625 times as fast

and 128 cables... oh my god

Quick, get the bonding glue and a spool of coax!

It's download time!!!

Can o' worms

In a related story, RIAA and MPAA have both filed suit in court to preemptively obtain ISP subscriber information before any infringement can occur.

"It's an important step forward for the Web 3.0," Ebeneezer Swindler, lawyer for the RIAA, said. "Someone could get on that evil BitTorrent site and download our content. This happens so fast that by the time we logged in we couldn't even see their IP addresses. Our current technology requires us to temporarily join the pirates so we could get their information... it's no good if they'd already stolen what they needed and gotten out of there!"

"It's NO good," reiterated Swindler, with peculiar emphasis on the "NO."

No government official could be reached for comment as they were busy preordering ivory backscratchers from expected additional campaign contributions from the MAFIAA.

Funny definition of competition

They're competing with FiOS? The connection promised by every phone company 10 years ago that was never delivered despite being given money by the government to do so? The connection technology just now being rolled out by ONE phone company in a handful of cities?

That's competition?

More information can be found at:

More information can be found at:
1. Specifications: http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/specifica tions30.html [cablemodem.com]
2. Press release: http://www.cablelabs.com/news/pr/2006/06_pr_docsis 30_080706.html [cablelabs.com]
3. Ars Technica article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060808-7450 .html [arstechnica.com]

Slowskies

At this rate, they're NEVER gonna get the Slowskies away from their beloved ADSL and get them to become Comcast subscribers...

Not multiple cable lines...

instead, multiple upstream or downstream channels are used. The real factor in achieving these speeds depends on what modulation type your cable op decides to configure on the CMTS. In a perfect world everything is 256-QAM/128-QAM, but you will often see 32-QAM implimented because the end to end cabling can't support the rf throughput required for higher bandwidth modulation types. The wiki article on DOCSIS [wikipedia.org] is a good place to start for more information.

Horrible description

The description stating that it "It bonds together four cable lines" is a horrible description of what is likely going on here.

Cable/tv channels are 6 MHz wide. On a typical cable system you can use 256QAM to encode digital data for transmission. In 6 MHz you can get about 39 Mbps. If you bond four channels together (24 MHz) that's 156 Mbps using 256QAM.

So what it sounds like is DOCSIS 3 supports channel bonding or perhaps simply a very wide channel.

The "four cable lines" has nothing to do with how much physical coax comes to your house. On paper an all digital 750 MHz plant could deliver on the order of 4.5 Gbps. But having 70 channels of analog really cuts into that.

150" tap on a 1" pipe

Just having a faster modem will not result in faster downloads. It is like fixing a huge 150" tap to a 1" pipe. Unless the internet backbone, the servers, the routers, switches, bridges increase their capacities we are not going to see an across the board increase in download and upload speeds. We might see some fast on demand IP based TV solution provided by the ISP and stuff like that. But slashdot.org is probably going to load at the same speed it is currently loading and your email attachments are going to take as much to upload as it is currently taking.

Irrelevant for a number of non-technical reasons.

Assume for a moment that a cable company will actually run four cable lines to your house in lieu of fiber. Most home users will have little need for that type of speed.

I remember hearing the CEO of Time Warner ask this question in regards to fios: What can't you do with 30 Mbps that you can do with 100 Mbps? He was stating that you can easily do VOD, Voice, and Data over 30 Mbps connections and there was no reason for more speed.

With that attitude, do you think these guys will actually deploy this technology?

The only application I can see for these types of speeds is private connections. I would love to have a 100 Mbps connection between my sites, but the only way to get private connections between sites is leased lines and the last time I priced a private DS3 my boss got sticker shock.

Eventually regular consumers will not care about extra speed. We may already be at that point - plenty of people like Verizon's cheap DSL (768k/128k) because it's cheap and faster than dialup. Once joe average stops caring about speed increases, the only way to sell this service will be to interconnect businesses via private circuits.....but that is a long way off.

Cable companies and telcos like Verizon need to start thinking about faster uploads, static IP, and private connections to get businesses interested.

-ted

Not "developed by ... CableLabs"

Comcast CEO dazzled cable industry audience by showcasing a super quick modem, using a technology called DOCSIS 3.0. It was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories.

It is not clear whether the "it" referred to is the modem or the "technology called DOCSIS 3.0". In either case, the quoted information is not true.

DOCSIS 3.0 is a suite of specifications that represents the newest release of the DOCSIS specifications that have been around for nearly a decade now. CableLabs (the usual name for "Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.") managed the process of creating the specs, and performed the actual publication, but the specs themselves were developed in almost entirely by equipment manufacturers, with input from interested (mostly large) cable operators.

Similarly, the modem that was demonstrated was built not by CableLabs but by one of those equipment manufacturers (ARRIS, for whom I work, although I have no direct association with the group that builds the DOCSIS 3.0 modem; I was a contributor to the DOCSIS 3.0 specs).

The complete sleep-inducing suite of specs may be downloaded from www.cablelabs.com.

It's not the speed!

This is all very nice and impressive, but it's besides the point.

Verizon is coming into the Washington metro area with FIOS and based on informal discussions with friends and colleagues is kicking Comcast's butt.

Right now, it's primarily a price issue. High speed internet (5M/2M) is similarly price, but the FIOS TV is where Verizon has a huge advantage. Right now, most people are reporting savings of $25/month (that's SAVINGS) and this is for more channels, but standard def and high def.

Plus, the Verizon installers are, in general, far more professional because they haven't outsourced installation to guys in pickup trucks. They do it themselves, and the quality of their work is outstanding.

The good news here is for consumers... Comcast must do something they've refused to do so far... compete on price, because they have less features than Verizon. Right now, Comcast is offering limited deals (1 year, all your boxes for free), but as FIOS penetrates more neighborhoods, the prices will drop.

This really is good news for everybody.

This is a stop-gap at best

As much as the cablecos would like to make us all go "oooh" and "aaah" over this technology, it's still incredibly unimpressive. We won't see rollouts of this technology for at least a year and most projections show just 40% of cable subscribers will have access to DOCSIS 3.0 by 2012. It's really not all that impressive considering that projects like UTOPIA [utopianet.org] and FIOS are currently delivering better speeds than cable and can ramp up to 100Mbps+ without much in the way of equipment upgrades. UTOPIA can even do 1Gbps+ with a minimum of new equipment. This is just another way for incumbent providers to squeeze more blood from the turnip that is their aging copper-based plant. The stock market will reward them now, but the market as a whole will be punishing them in 5-10 years.

Re:Saturation

And maybe I'm not understanding, but I only have 1 cable line running into my house. So how does this help me? Does this require them to lay more lines? Because if it does, they may as well lay fibre-optics, which has much more potential for higher speeds.

Re:Saturation

And maybe I'm not understanding, but I only have 1 cable line running into my house. So how does this help me? Does this require them to lay more lines?

Dude, just go to Radio Shack and get a few cable splitters. Problem solved.

Re:Saturation

Dude, just go to Radio Shack and get a few cable splitters. Problem solved.

That is if your local Radio Shack sells anything besides cell phones.

4 Channels, not 4 Cables

They mean 4 channels/frequencies, not 4 cables. 40Mbps over a single channel is normal, so 160Mbps over 4 channels makes sense. Channel bonding is very normal to speed things up, they use it in 802.11n and most newer cellular data transmission protocols. I don't see why this should make slashdot. It is nothing new and nothing revolutionary.

Re:Saturation

The article description isn't very accurate - when they say "lines", they really mean "channels". Cable modems now operating on a single 6mhz "channel" on the cable line. DOCSIS3 [cablelabs.com] lets the modem "bond" several channels to increase bandwidth. Only one physical cable is still required. This takes away from the # of channels available for TV, but as they move more of the channels off analog to digital (which fit multiple channels in a single 6mhz band) frequency space is being freed.

Re:Still not fast enough...

Dude, have you seen any real women up close? The last thing you want is a girlfriend.