2009 - Lots of Bandwidth?

Yesterday, Comcast announced 50Mbps service in Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The service is being offerred over upgraded DOCSIS 3.0 tiers and will initially cover only parts of the listed cities.

The company is offering two new residential tiers:

• Extreme 50, offering up to 50 Mbps of downstream speed and up to 10 Mbps of upstream speed at $139.95/month.
• Ultra, offering up to 22 Mbps of downstream speed and up to 5 Mbps of upstream speed at $62.95/month.

And two new business class tiers:

• Deluxe, offering 50 Mbps / 10 Mbps tier for $189.95/month, which includes a full suite of features and support.
• Premium, offering speeds up to 22 Mbps / 5 Mbps for only $99.95/month.

The company says they will complete upgrading these cities early next year and will continue to roll out high bandwidth (what Comcast is calling wideband ) services at a rapid pace.

With the cable companies rolling out these tier levels we should see the telcos (Verizon and AT&T especially) respond pretty quickly. If you are fortunate enough to live or work in an area where there is this kind of broadband competition 2009 should be a nice year - you'll be seeing some very nice service offerings as the cable companies and telcos go after your business.

Cable Companies Moving Fast With DOSCIS 3.0 Products and Services

There's been a lot of DOCSIS 3.0 activity recently as the cable companies move rapidly towards bandwidths of 100 Mbps and greater. In April 2007, CableLabs, the cable modem certification consortium, accelerated their certification plan time-line and we're now seeing certified products at deployable levels. Earlier time-lines did not have product reaching deployable levels until late 2008 or early 2009.

Key to this accelerated certification plan was CableLabs decision to "tier" feature availability for product manufactures with the following qualification levels:

Bronze Qualification: Supports IPv6 and Downstream Channel Bonding

Silver Qualification: Adds Advanced Encryption System (AES) and Upstream Channel Bonding

Full Qualification: All DOCSIS 3.0 Features

This tiered level of certification is expected to be dropped in early 2009, when all cable modems will need to have "Full" qualification.

Today (a little over a year later) we're seeing nice results from the accelerated time-line. Here's a couple of quotes from a recent Cable Digital News interview with Time Warner Cable president and CEO Glenn Britt:

Time Warner Cable conducted some Wideband tests in Austin, Texas, last year, "and it works fine."

While 100 Mbit/s seems to be the early sought-after speed benchmark for DOCSIS 3.0, Britt said he's seen it deliver speeds up to 200 Mbit/s, albeit in a lab setting.

Britt also said Time Warner will begin testing Docsis 3.0 in New York "later this year" and roll out DOCSIS 3.0 more widely in 2009 and 2010, "in response to demand." We'll see if Time Warner accelerates the New York City roll-out in direct competition with Verizon's New York City FiOS roll-out.

Comcast is also moving fast with DOCSIS 3.0, having launched the service in the Minneapolis area and working to have as much as 20 percent of its footprint DOCSIS 3.0 ready by year's end.

Wideband - It's Not Just Broadband Anymore

On April 3, Comcast launched its first Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) 3.0 service roll-out in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul (Twin Cities) region. The company is currently offering up to 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) downloads and 5 Mbps uploads for $149.95 per month to residents and businesses in the region. Here's a quote from a Comcast press release:

“This announcement marks the beginning of the evolution from broadband to wideband,” said Mitch Bowling, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Comcast High-Speed Internet, Comcast Cable. “Wideband is the future and it’s coming fast. We believe wideband will usher-in a new era of speed and Internet innovation for today’s digital consumers.”

The use of the term "wideband" is interesting here because (in the way it is being used by Comcast) it represents a combination of higher bandwidth along with the types of converged services higher bandwidths allow. As video, high-speed Internet and digital phone services converge we'll start to see services converge and cross devices - the same Comcast press release mentions future applications like Universal Caller ID to the TV and PC, viewable voice mail and the ability to program DVRs remotely.

These applications are just a hint of things to come as downstream and upstream bandwidths continue to rise, prices per Mbps drop and application developers take advantage. Perhaps wideband provides a better description of where we're going.


For more on DOCSIS 3.0:

Read Show Notes and listen to Mike Q and my 34 minute technical Podcast titled The Next Generation Cable Network: DOCSIS 3.0 linked here.
Listen directly in your web browser by clicking here.
Podcasts also free on iTunes.