our cable connection's pathetic upstream speeds may soon be a thing of the past. CableLabs recently announced the successful completion of the Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 specification, which should ultimately help cable companies deliver symmetrical (both upstream and downstream) speeds of up to 10 Gbps. But the organization has since announced the release of the full DOCSIS 3.1 Physical Layer Specification, which should pave the way for commercial deployment of much faster cable speeds over the next five years or so.
For its part, Comcast says it's
working with CableLabs and its vendors to make Distributed Access Architecture nodes Full Duplex (FDX)-capable.
Full-fledged deployments of Full Duplex (FDX) DOCSIS are still quite a few years away, but CableLabs members told attendees of an industry event this week that suppliers have made enough progress to be ready for initial interoperability testing later this year.
Cable’s upstream has long been relegated to a limited slice of bandwidth (5 MHz to 42 MHz) referred to as a "low split." To dramatically increase upstream cable speeds, cable operators have been exploring a "mid-split" that would bump the ceiling to 85 MHz, or a "high-split" that would push it to 200 MHz. Full duplex technology would eliminate the need for these splits entirely.
Ultimately, these advancements should result in full duplex 10 Gbps bandwidth per node, up from the original 10 Gbps down, 1 Gbps DOCSIS 3.1 standard. That should ultimately be great news for cable broadband customers who want more than the 35 Mbps maximum upstream delivered by companies that have already partially deployed DOCSIS 3.1 updates.