It's no secret that Cablevision should be announcing new faster Optimum Online speeds very soon, something confirmed recently by COO Tom Rutledge in a conference call with investors and analysts to discuss last quarter's earnings. The cable provider is spending $300 million to upgrade all of their markets with the speedier technology and deploy free Wi-Fi to a growing number of areas. While Wi-Fi is nice, our speed freaks are of course more interested in getting their hands of DOCSIS 3.0 technology.

Judging from comments made by Rutledge, the DOCSIS 3.0 portion of Cablevision's upgrade plan is moving along at a faster clip than the Wi-Fi installations.

"We've nearly completed the DOCSIS 3.0 wideband deployment across our service area as part of Wi-Fi rollout," said Rutledge, "and we expect to make an announcement shortly related to a wideband product for both residential and business customers." The deployment should cost Cablevision between $70 and $120 per customer (they have more than 3.1 million).

Rumblings from inside Cablevision this week indicate that the company started beta testing one of their higher-end implementations of DOCSIS 3.0 on Tuesday.

According to posts in our Cablevision forum, the new tier being tested by Cablevision offers 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for $289.95 per month. Before you complain about the price, note that this is a beta, and this specific tier would be targeted at very heavy residential or small business users. More affordable DOCSIS 3.0 tiers somewhere around 50Mbps are obviously likely.

Cablevision's current fastest speed offering is named "Boost", a 30Mbps/5Mbps DOCSIS 2.0 tier that's uncapped in the truest sense of the word. While fast, faster speeds would help Cablevision in their marketing battle against Verizon FiOS, which is quickly ramping up their efforts to deploy FTTH across New York City. From our conversations with Cablevision this week, they don't seem particularly interested in instituting caps or metered billing.

I asked Cablevision about this latest beta and was told they have no comment at this time. We hope to have more information soon, and from all indications customers shouldn't have long to wait.