IP Democracy: Don't Get Excited About Wideband Modems Yet

I got to Las Vegas’ McCarran airport this morning with plenty of time to do a little bit of blogging after the NCTA show. But, as is too painfully often the case, the very bad public Wi-Fi connection at McCarran combined with Microsoft’s hijacking of my laptop for the installation of its latest updates left me with no ability to post an item on yesterday’s dazzling demo by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts of cable’s new super-fast high-speed Internet technology called DOCSIS 3.0.

In the interim, it seems that Om Malik telepathically wrote my post for me. Om points out that the scorching Internet speed Roberts demo’ed at a general session at the NCTA show “isn’t really coming to your home anytime soon.”

DOCSIS 3.0 is cable’s next iteration of its phenomenally successful cable modem standard, and the lingo applied to it is “wideband” to differentiate the technology from plain-old broadband service (POBS?). Using multiple cable channels in a process called channel-bonding, instead of the single channel used today, cable’s wideband cable modem can achieve top download speeds of 150 Mbps, 200 Mbps or whatever the market will bear. (One ugly secret of DOCSIS 3.0 is the paltry upload speeds it supports.)

In a reprise of a similar demo Roberts conducted before the NCTA crowd back in 1996, when he showed off what was then plain old cable modems (POCMs?), Roberts used the channel-bonding technology to download the entire Encylopedia Britannica plus a Merriam-Webster dictionary in 3 minutes and 52 seconds, an effort that would entail 3 hours and 12 minutes over a standard cable modem.

“We’re going to unleash a whole new era of video, voice and ultra high-speed services,” Roberts said. But, and it’s a big drawback: DOCSIS 3.0 modems won’t be ready for years, two at least. When Roberts demo’ed the original DOCSIS modem back in 1996, the industry was on the cusp of deploying it, and if memory serves me right, TCI (now part of Comcast) already was testing cable’s new high-speed service commercially.

The modems were out there back in 1996, even if the mass manufacturing of the devices had yet to begin. The wideband cable modems won’t hit the market until the end of 2008, at the earliest. So Roberts was showing off a technology that consumers won’t be able to use any time soon. (That didn’t stop reporters from eating it all up anyway.)

Moreover, unlike in 1996, some technologists are privately grumbling about the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, saying that it’s not a long-term solution to cable’s capacity crunch. The day before Roberts’ demo I had several discussions at the NCTA show with folks who are knowledgeable about cable’s need for speed and whether DOCSIS 3.0 will do the trick. Nope, they said, at least not in the short-run. Cable needs all the extra capacity it can get right now to deploy high-definition channels and nobody wants to free up space for the very fast high-speed service, even if the modems were ready.

So, don’t get too excited about cable’s high-speed wideband service just yet.

Update: Here’s a YouTube video of Roberts’ demo.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 10, 2007 12:02 AM to IP Democracy