A “home team” crowd at the NCTA’s annual Cable Show watched adoringly as Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated a new broadband technology called wideband that will allow the Cableco’s Internet access subscribers to download such things as movies and videogames at up to 160 Mbps, which is upwards of 25 times faster than current cable broadband modems allow. The actual speed in the demo was 148 Mbps but what’s a few megabits-per-second among friends.
The speed that attendees at The Cable Show in Vegas saw is three times faster than the 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps or so that the telephone companies offer on their newest fiber optic networks (AT&T’s Lightspeed and Verizon’s FiOS). However, the two telcos can today only offer a maximum 1.5 Mbps to 6 Mbps in about 95% of their respective footprints.
AT&T and Verizon have been threatening to unseat the cablecos’ dominance in broadband, and pay-TV, with the fiber optic cable networks they have been deploying. So far, Verizon has offered the fastest fiber optic broadband speed, 50 Mbps, but promising ultimately to offer upwards of 100 Mbps over the FiOS network.
The 150 Mbps broadband download that Roberts showed could destroy half of the financial case the telcos have made to justify the billions of dollars they have committed to spend on building their fiber networks. The other half is based on the telcos’ need to offer pay-TV in order to match the multi-service bundling of phone, broadband access and pay-TV (or voice, data and video as it’s come to be called) that the cablecos are offering.
“That was real,” Roberts told attendees. “Everything you saw was real. It’s near-term. It is hopefully a reminder that we have an incredible future of innovation ahead. And personally, I think broadband penetration is going to go way higher than anybody ever imagined.”
ARRIS Group helped Roberts with the demonstration, which compared downloading a 300MB 30-second TV commercial. It took 16 minutes on a current cable modem, but only a few seconds with the wideband technology.
Roberts then showed a comparison of downloading the 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a total of 4GB. Today’s cable modems would take three hours and 12 minutes, Roberts said, but the wideband technology took only three minutes and 52 seconds. “If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips were downloaded in a few minutes,” he said.
“It really is a whole new technical platform,” Roberts continued. “What consumers actually do with all of this speed is up to the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.” He mentioned instant messaging in high-definition video as another possible use for such speeds.
The audience, including the top executives from other cable TV companies, stood and cheered Roberts’ demonstration.
The key ingredient for making the ultra-high-bandwidth technology possible is called “channel bonding.” Essentially, four or more “channels” are bonded together to carry more data, in effect making a bigger pipe. A single four-inch pipe carries more water than four one-inch pipes.
Roberts said the cost of the new technology and the new cable modems with channel-bonding would not be substantially higher in large volumes than the current cable modems. He did not say what the pricing would be.
Comcast currently offers 6 Mbps for $43 per month, although the price drops to $33 in a triple-play bundle. It gets $53 a month for 8 Mbps.
For comparison, here are the four DSL broadband plans that AT&T offers in its newly acquired BellSouth territory:
BellSouth for instance offers a 6 Mbps with a 512Kbps return path at $42.95a month.
In an interview with the AP, Roberts said the new technology could be available “within less than a couple years.”
Not mentioned was that J:COM, the largest cable TV service in Japan based on the number of customers served, is already delivering an early version of channel bonding technology in order to compete with the fiber optic networks that already exist in Japan.
Sources said that a number of US cable TV companies are testing the products that J:COM is using – in case the telcos begin cutting into their market share.
The US cable TV companies have evidently decided to wait until they can incorporate the channel bonding function into their next-generation network software called DOCSIS 3.0. CableLabs, the cablecos’ joint venture product development operation that is developing DOCSIS 3.0, says it expects cable modem manufacturers to begin submitting products for certification by year-end.
DOCSIS 3.0 with channel bonding is backward-compatible with existing cable modems in the field and thus can be rolled out incrementally. That’s unlike the telcos, which must deploy all new equipment and wiring in their fiber optic network, a multi-billion dollar under taking.
According to Roberts, the only problem is to find four analog TV channels that can be eliminated to have room for the four channels needed to provide 150 Mbps.
Eleven years earlier at the same show in Los Angeles, Roberts was the first to demonstrate the technology that is currently used in cable modems, showing a side-by-side comparison of how much faster it was at 10 Mbps than the phone companies’ dial-up or always-on ISDN services.
US cable TV operators, unlike in any other country, have become the dominant suppliers of broadband, with more than 29 million subscribers at the end of December 2006.
Multichannel News reported that at Comcast’s investor conference last week, Comcast CTO Tony Werner said the company expects to begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 gear in 2008 “if there are business cases to do it.”
He also said he expects DOCSIS 3.0 equipment to be significantly cheaper than current cable-modem systems on a cost-per-bit basis. That could make the cost of 100 Mbps the same as the current cost for 6 Mbps.