Motorola launched a full suit of DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems and cable termination systems last week using the Surfboard brand for the modems which will support channel bonding and deliver 160 Mbps broadband when four 6 MHz channels are bonded. It goes even faster in its European configuration where 8MHz channels are used, up to 195 Mbps.
This of course is not a straight comparison with fiber or with copper DSL. Hybrid Fiber Co-ax is shared across many homes and has 860 MHz of spectrum, and as many TV channels that a system has on it all have to be squeezed into the smallest space that they can, usually having to use MPEG2 as a codec. What’s left over can be shared equally among those customers requesting VoD services or high speed internet services, and of course if there are 4 spare 6MHz channels available that person will get blazing speed. But it’s a first come first serve basis, so that is rarely going to happen right now, and the resulting broadband speeds will be significantly faster, but we don’t think they will average anything like 160 Mbps.
Telco networks are different, a user gets the full speed of the line they are on, because that is a star network, not a loop, but both networks are likely to be constrained more by their backhaul, than by their native speed.
High Definition channels can be added to a cable system using different codecs like H.264, because the customer has to change the device in order to view HD programming anyway, so introducing HD is a good way of piecemeal upgrading your customers to H.264. But all the SD channels have to work with whatever is out there, existing set tops, which means only working with MPEG2 encoding, which takes up about 2.5 times the bandwidth of H.264.
Over the next three or four years cable operators are set to reap the harvest of spare capacity on their systems by slowly upgrading the customer premises equipment to use more modern codecs, and hence freeing up more and more bandwidth, so that DOCSIS 3.0 connected customers are more likely to actually experience the 160 Mbps speeds that the DOCSIS 3.0 modems can handle.
Motorola says that its key differentiator for the product line is that it has a Quality of Service (QoS) layer at the edge of the network, which of course will plug straight into its NBBS Device Management Platform.
Texas Instruments was one of the first companies to be DOCSIS 3.0 compliant with its Puma 5 chip and Motorola has chosen it for its new DOCSIS 3.0 devices. We know that Conexant Systems and Broadcom came out far earlier with chips that offered channel bonding, but these were not supporting the full DOCSIS 3.0 spec although some offered IPv6 addressing, and so Texas is claiming the high ground with an earlier compliant chip set than Broadcom and other suppliers like STMicro and Microtune.
Motorola is now offering cable and digital voice modems that support all DOCSIS 3.0 features including channel bonding, IPv6, and advanced encryption services.
But when all the publicity materials suggest that no upgrade is required, again this is not strictly true. A new Cable Modem Termination System is required to support DOCSIS 3.0 modems. However once the CMTS is installed, then it can still support a lot of old DOCSIS 1.0 and 2.0 plant out there, so the CPE doesn’t all have to be upgraded at once. If it did them Comcast would have been treated a lot worse by Wall Street when it committed at a recent results meeting, to upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0.
A few weeks back an investor group called Chieftain Capital Management which owns 2% of Comcast called for CEO Brian Roberts to step down after Wall Street lost its long term patience with the stock, because it always has such a high capex spend.
Meanwhile Motorola this week bought a Chinese digital cable set top maker Dahua Digital, made up of two systems companies Zhejiang Dahua Digital Technology and Hangzhou Image Silicon. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
These companies are privately held and build set tops as well as some of the chips that go into them, and which are likely the difference between non-Chinese devices and those that are sold in China. Motorola said that Dahua Digital has a substantial China cable operator customer base.
The transaction will improve Motorola’s time to market in the region and give it a strong, locally based business to keep track of the evolving Chinese set top market.
Motorola said that 130 million Chinese households currently subscribe to cable, but of course these are largely analog systems and digital cable is expected to grow from 10 million in 2006 to over 165 million by 2016.