Broadcom this week announced at CES that the company has announced their first "system on a chip" design based on the freshly-built DOCSIS 3.1 standard, paving the way for 1 Gbps cable service to the home. According to the company announcement, these 1 Gbps offering should start arriving this year, though most deployments aren't expected to ramp up in scale until 2016.

"By more effectively using our cable plant to grow our total throughput, we expect to offer our customers more than 1 Gigabit speeds in their homes in 2015 and beyond," Comcast is quoted as saying in Brodcom's announcement.

In December, six unnamed hardware vendors completed the first round of interoperability tests for new DOCSIS 3.1 products, gear that will someday be capable of offering 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream. CableLabs plans to host a follow up interoperability testing session during the week of January 19, 2015.

"The BCM3390 cable modem SoC delivers video content with a nearly 50 percent increased efficiency on existing spectrum allocations and allows for the delivery and use of a new range of content and services," states Broadcom. "The single device supports high-speed data rates exceeding 1 Gbps. The BCM93390 modem reference design with integrated Wi-Fi provides up to 2 Gigabit speeds in the home, providing a path for cable operators to transition to all-IP video."

The first chipsets out of the gate, including Broadcom's solution, will be hybrid solutions that support both DOCSIS 3.1 and DOCSIS 3.0 backward compatibility. Broadcom's BCM93390 chipset features two OFDM 196MHz downstream channels, 32 single-carrier DOCSIS 3.0 QAM downstream channels, two 96MHz OFDM-A upstream channels, and 8 single-carrier DOCSIS 3.0 upstream QAM channels.