Cable Operators Move Ahead with Wideband Rollouts
LOS ANGELES -- Driven largely by competition from big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, large cable operators now offer DOCSIS 3.0 wideband service across most of North America. Speaking at the NCTA show last week, engineering executives from five major U.S. and Canadian cable companies cited progress in upgrading cable networks for DOCSIS 3.0 service, which enables data downstream speeds of 100 Mbps or more through virtual channel-bonding. Some plan to start leveraging DOCSIS 3.0 for faster data upstream speeds for the first time.
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Comcast, probably the most aggressive with wideband so far, is pushing DOCSIS 3.0 service to more than 40 million homes, about 83 percent of its footprint. Plans call for boosting that to 100 percent this year. Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner said Comcast offers downstream speeds as high as 50 Mbps in all its wideband markets and plans to offer even higher speeds soon. Werner said Comcast, which competes against Verizon or AT&T in most of its larger markets, is bonding at least three 6-MHz channels for DOCSIS 3.0 service. In most of its markets, it’s adding a fourth bonded channel, he said.
Time Warner Cable, which has lagged others with DOCSIS 3.0, is starting to pick up the pace. CTO Mike LaJoie said the company is “installing nothing but 3.0 gear.” Time Warner Cable has upgraded only about 20 percent of its footprint for wideband service. Cox has wired about half of its network for DOCSIS 3.0. CTO Scott Hatfield said it expects to have a bit more than two-thirds of its network upgraded for wideband by year-end. Suddenlink offers DOCSIS 3.0 to about 65 percent of its basic subscribers, up from 12 percent in mid-2009. CTO Terry Cordova said it’s shooting for 75 percent coverage before 2011.
Rogers fully upgraded its cable network for the latest DOCSIS standard, after having completed its network upgrade just a week earlier. Dermot O'Carroll, senior vice president of access networks, said the company offers the service to about 70 percent of its households passed. He said Rogers, which started deploying DOCSIS 3.0 service in the Toronto area in August, has started testing service in the rest of its footprint, which consists mainly of two Atlantic Canadian provinces.
Calling upstream channel bonding “one of our top priorities” at Rogers, O'Carroll said the company is doing field trials of the technology in preparation for launch in 2011. Rogers additionally is exploring the use of 64 QAM technology and 6.4-MHz-wide channels for the upstream, he said. O'Carroll said the moves will let Rogers offer 30-Mbps speeds over its older DOCSIS 2.0 cable modems. The actions also will give Rogers a “bridge” to upstream channel bonding, he said.
Comcast, which has also been testing upstream channel bonding, is starting to boost upstream speeds for DOCSIS 3.0 subscribers. Werner said it began upstream channel bonding in two undisclosed markets. Comcast has also begun upgrading its network to 64-QAM technology. Like Rogers, it’s starting to turn up 6.4-MHz-wide channels for additional broadband bandwidth. “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.”
Werner, LaJoie, and O'Carroll said cable operators aren’t seeing as much demand for symmetrical bandwidth as they did just a couple of years ago. While subscriber demand for upstream bandwidth is expanding rapidly, they said, demand for downstream bandwidth is expanding even faster, because of the explosive growth of Web video downloads. “Internet traffic is becoming less symmetrical, not more,” O'Carroll said.