Comcast Puts DOCSIS 3.1 Live in the Field
The race to deploy gigabit broadband to the home heats up.
If there were any questions about how quickly DOCSIS 3.1’s development has progressed, Comcast Vice President of Access Architecture Jorge Salinger has laid them to rest.
Speaking here on Tuesday, Salinger announced that Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) is now testing DOCSIS 3.1 in the field. “The target for us is to be in the field establishing network readiness in 2015,” he said. “Our overall goal is to be able to deploy DOCSIS 3.1 and gigabit-per-second in a broad scale starting in 2016.”
The field tests mean that the largest US MSO has orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals running over its existing HFC plant. The cable industry’s shift to DOCSIS 3.1 marks the first time that the DOCSIS specification is breaking free of its old 6MHz and 8MHz channels and moving instead to OFDM subcarriers. “We have OFDM signals running in one of our networks, in one of our headends,” Salinger said.