HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Ovum have produced a report for NBN in Australia regarding the future of the HFC networks nearly all Virgin Media customers receive their services on.

Hat-tip ISPReview.

I'm aware of a few things VM are doing along these lines, and their evolution towards the standards put forward is in progress.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Mike Fries at a recent internal Q&A advised that we were heading to 1Gb

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Indeed. You guys aren't overbuilding the 750 MHz networks with 1.2 GHz kit for fun.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

1Gbit seems to be the milestone everyone wants. I feel as though that's the point where most people (certainly residents) will just go "Yeah that's good enough for me", at least until some critical application gets invented that somehow makes use of it. Even 4K streaming wouldn't put a dent in 1gbit.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

it is still a way off. I imagine 500mbits will come out next year with docsis 3.1 with 750mbits in 2018 and 1gbit in 2019.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

I would go a bit further and expect a gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 service with the price tag and contract to cover the new modem to match.

Those modems can draw all the DOCSIS 3.0 capacity being used for the existing services along with at least one 96 MHz OFDM block all for them.

I see no value in DOCSIS 3.1 modems with tiers that are a half-way house. As long as uptake isn't high 750Mb can be done with 24 channels via DOCSIS 3.0. It would feel like a bit of a disappointment, a damp squib, to deploy 3.1 for anything less than a gig.

Although as a disclaimer people may really, really not like the upstream speed that will initially come with such a service. The current DOCSIS 3.1 deployments are using DOCSIS 3.0 upstreams, so 1000Mb down, 35 - 50Mb up ahoy.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

hopefully that will only be in the short term and something they will work in improving asap

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

A lot of the literature I've read seems to indicate that the 3.1 rollout will come first, with a push for gigabit+ on the downstream, but after that the focus will be on symmetrical connections to bring upstream in line. That's a good 5 year+ plan, though.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Comcast are leading the way, and due to the hardware restrictions their product uses 24+ 6MHz DOCSIS 3.0 SC-QAMs and a single 3.1 96 MHz OFDM block downstream.

Upstream it uses the same 4 SC-QAM upstreams as DOCSIS 3.0.

This shouldn't be a shock to anyone, for example VM's DOCSIS 3.0 product used a single DOCSIS 1.1 upstream originally, no upstream bonding for a while.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Yeah, upstream speeds have never really been headline grabbers but I suspect once people start seeing what is effectively download speeds they'll never (Rarely) max out, upload speeds will be next.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

The early DOCSIS 3.0 kit that VM and Comcast, among others, used was downstream bonding only. Very few vendors supported upstream and downstream bonding straight away.

Kinda simliar story here. The line cards VM have in their Cisco cBR-8 are ready to deliver DOCSIS 3.1 on the downstream. Upstream, however, a different story.

Re: HFC: Delivering Gigabit Broadband
 

Yeah, I am not surprised at all. There's not much incentive to spend the extra money on the upstream side of things. I think people would be thrilled at 10:1 alone, never mind anything higher.