LOS ANGELES – Spurred in many cases by increased competition from telecom providers, the big North American cable operators are now offering ultra-fast wideband service throughout much of the continent.
In a panel discussion at the NCTA’s Cable Show last week, the top engineering executives from five major Canadian and U.S. MSOs spelled out their progress in rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 service, which enables data downstream speeds of 100 Mbps or greater. They also outlined their plans to start using DOCSIS 3.0 to offer faster upstream speeds.
Along among the five large MSOs represented on the panel, Rogers Communications has fully upgraded its cable network for the latest DOCSIS standard, which relies on virtual channel-bonding to power higher speeds. Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice president of access networks for Rogers, said the MSO finished the network upgrade just a week earlier.
O’Carroll said Rogers, which started deploying DOCSIS 3.0 service in the greater Toronto area last August, now offers it to about 70% of its households passed. He also said the MSO has begun testing service in the rest of its footprint beyond the GTA into its other Ontario regions and in New Brunswick and Newfoundland.
Comcast, which has been one of the most aggressive U.S. MSOs with wideband, now offers DOCSIS 3.0 service to more than 40 million homes, covering 83% of its footprint. Tony Werner, executive vice-president and CTO of Comcast, said his company is offering downstream speeds as high as 50 Mbps in all of its wideband markets and intends to offer faster speeds soon.
Werner said Comcast, which competes fiercely against either Verizon Communications or AT&T Communications in most of its cable markets, is bonding a minimum of three 6-MHz channels for wideband everywhere and is adding a fourth channel in most of its markets.
Time Warner Cable, which has been a relative laggard with DOCSIS 3.0, is picking up the pace as well. Mike LaJoie, executive vice-president and CTO, said the company is "installing nothing but 3.0 gear now." Unlike Rogers and Comcast, Time Warner has deployed DOCSIS 3.0 to only about 20% of its footprint so far.
Cox and Suddenlink, the other two companies on the panel, fall somewhere in between Comcast and Time Warner, in terms of deployment.
Turning to the upstream side, where channel-bonding is trickier to pull off, O’Carroll said upstream channel bonding "is one of our top priorities" at Rogers. With the MSO now looking at using 64 QAM technology and 6.4MHz-wide channels for the upstream, he said these twin moves will allow Rogers to offer 30-Mbps speeds over DOCSIS 2.0 networks (64 QAM and 6.4 MHz channels are useful for both DOCSIS 2.0 and DOCSIS 3.0, but channel bonding is specific to 3.0). He also said these moves will provide Rogers with a "bridge" to upstream channel bonding next year after it completes its current field trials of the technology.
Werner said Comcast has about 30% of its network upgraded to 64 QAM and is turning up 6.4MHz-wide channels in the upstream, similar to Rogers. In addition to lab work, Comcast has been running upstream channel bonding in two markets.
“We’ve seen a lot more growth in our downstream over the last 12 to 24 months, but that said, we see growth on both up and down," Werner said. "We have tremendous capability to blast the upstream more if and where it’s needed… We feel like we have plenty of wriggle room.”
O’Carroll, Werner, and LaJoie all added that cable operators aren’t seeing as urgent demand from customers for symmetrical bandwidth as they did just a couple of years ago. Although the demand for upstream bandwidth is expanding rapidly, they noted, the demand for downstream bandwidth is expanding even more rapidly because of the explosive growth of web video downloads.
“Internet traffic is becoming less symmetrical, not more,” O’Carroll said.
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network and helped cover the 2010 Cable Show for Cartt.ca.
