FTTH Con: FTTP providers need not fear DOCSIS 3.0, says cable guru

NASHVILLE -- Fiber-to-the-premises providers don’t have much to fear from DOCSIS 3.0 technology, which boosts the bandwidth of cable broadband networks, according to Jim Farmer, chief network architect for Enablence’s Wave7 FTTx networks division.

Speaking at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference this week, Farmer, a noted technologist with a distinguished career in the cable industry, said, “DOCSIS 3.0 is not an FTTH-killer, though it may help [cable operators] in some cases. I think it will be a more limited threat than people think.”

DOCSIS 3.0 allows cable television to bond – typically in fours – the channels through which cable operators deliver services to their subscribers. Each 6-mHz channel can deliver about 10 standard-definition channels or 2 high-definition channels using MPEG-2 encoding. Using MPEG-4 encoding, they can each deliver about 20 standard or 4 HD channels. Or they can deliver nearly 40 Mb/s of data, which is shared among users.

“The problem is: For every 38 Mb/s of data you put downstream, you lose the ability to program 10 standard definition or 2 high-definition channels,” Farmer said. “This is a big headache for the cable industry.”

“Exacerbating the problem is the fact that [major cable operators] are not in a position to take advantage of MPEG-4 compression to any great extent,” Farmer said. “They have close to 10 years of set tops [deployed] that only decode MPEG-2.”

Comcast has already begun using pre-standard DOCSIS 3.0 technology in some markets, promising to deploy it to 20% of its customer base by the end of this year and the entire footprint by 2010. Time Warner Cable has said it will deploy the technology “surgically” in select markets.

This month Texas Instruments introduced a new DOCSIS 3.0 chip that bonds eight channels to yield 320 Mb/s of shared bandwidth.

“They’re not out of tricks,” Farmer said of the cable companies.