Cable Eyes DOCSIS 3.1 For Faster Upstream Speeds → Really?

How can any cable company call this a godsend for upstream when they don't bother taking advantage of it on any DOCSIS version?

True... in docsis 1 they had 1-way modems in 1.1 they had kilobits & 1-2 megabits up.. in 2.0 they splurged and did up to 5 up.. now it's 8-15 up with docsis 3.0 and channel bonding is FISRT getting to customers THIS year.

Technically, docsis 3.1 was SUPPOSED to be a mere technical FIRMWAREish upgrade.. not replacing cmts/node equip, scrubbing the outside plant for line noise and other expensive plant tasks... but that's what it's turning out to be... much to the annoyance of cablecos. Luckily it isn't as bad as individual line conditioning on copper twist pairs or you'd never see such a quick upgrade.

False - this was never approached as a firmware upgrade. (I've been in the middle of it since inception.). As we have gone through the process, there has definitely been tweaking - but that's normal; and it's largely still in line with what we set out to do.

Cablevision has had downstream channel bonding for a while. They announced optimum ultra in 2009 which uses downstream channel bonding

They started UPSTREAM channel bonding in the past week.

Also cablevision just got rid of the analog channels at the end of 2012. The upstream channels were being used by the analog tv channels. So the room for more upstream was just freed up.

I've never read that it would be a "firmware" upgrade. I've have read that it will be backward compatible. I understand 3.1 correctly, it changes the modulation technique to OFDM, does away with the 6mhz "channels" and instead uses much smaller OFDM slots that can be flexibly bonded in spectrum chunks up to 100 or 200mhz. The upstream cut off is raised from 42mhz to something like 200mhz -- which allows for much improved upstream speeds.

Changing the modulation technique seems like it would be a hardware vs. firmware upgrade.

By using more efficient OFDM (which some claim is 50% more efficient), they aim to support at 10Gbps x 1Gbps.

If you have been involved from the beginning, can you explain why its 3.1? I mean this is a major major change. In the past, they have seem to have used the normal . release for minor things. This should be 4.0 right?