Comcast Docsis 3.1 Upload Rollout Southeastern Ma

The speeds aren't real but they are spectacular —

Comcast offers tantalizing hint of a hereafter with upload speeds to a higher place 35Mbps

Lab examination produces 4Gbps upload speeds merely bodily uploads are nevertheless three to 35Mbps.

Enlarge / Flick of a Comcast router/modem gateway from the company's website.

Comcast today offered the latest hint of a future in which its cablevision customers won't be limited to 35Mbps upload speeds. Announcing a recent lab examination, Comcast said its research team "deliver[ed] upstream and downstream throughputs of greater than 4Gbps" and that "future optimization" will allow "fifty-fifty greater chapters."

This was "the offset-always alive lab test" of a Broadcom "system-on-chip (SOC) device that will pave the way for Comcast to deliver multigigabit upload and download speeds over its hybrid-fiber coaxial (HFC) network," Comcast said. Information technology won't require installation of more cables because the "technology works using the same types of connections already installed in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide," Comcast said.

Cable customers have been waiting a long time for upload speeds that aren't a tiny fraction of download speeds. Comcast'southward cablevision uploads, ranging from 3Mbps to 35Mbps, are and so low that Comcast hides them deep inside its online ordering system. While cable download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps are prominently displayed, Comcast doesn't tell customers what upload speeds they'll get until they enter a valid credit carte number.

Comcast justified its tactic of hiding upload speeds past saying that its "website reflects the way customers use the Internet, with downstream overwhelmingly dominating usage." But occasionally, such as in today's proclamation, Comcast acknowledges that customers want higher upload speeds.

"This milestone is particularly exciting considering this engineering is an important step forward toward unlocking multigigabit upload and download speeds for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, not only a select few," Comcast executive Charlie Herrin said in the announcement.

"Full duplex" DOCSIS

Comcast does offer a residential cobweb service with upload and download speeds of 2Gbps, but availability is express and the service costs $300 a calendar month, plus installation and activation charges of up to $i,000 combined. The cobweb service requires the installation of new wires into each dwelling, but the newly announced lab exam delivered multi-gigabit upload and download speeds over the standard cable wires that Comcast has installed throughout its 39-land territory.

The test used a Broadcom SOC powered past the latest version of DOCSIS, the Data Over Cablevision Service Interface Specification. The Broadcom "device is expected to become the world'due south first product silicon to be developed using the DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex standard, which represents an evolutionary leap forward in the ability to evangelize ultra-fast speeds over HFC [hybrid cobweb-coaxial] networks," Comcast said. "One of the most important breakthroughs in the DOCSIS iv.0 standard is the ability to use network spectrum more efficiently, assuasive operators to dramatically increase upstream speeds without sacrificing downstream spectrum to do so."

Years of unfulfilled upload-speed promises

The cablevision industry has been promising symmetrical upload and download speeds over cable networks for years without ever saying when such speeds will become bachelor.

The DOCSIS 3.1 specification released in 2013 theoretically allowed 10Gbps downloads and 1Gbps upload speeds, but actual implementations never came shut to those numbers. An update to DOCSIS three.1 finalized tardily in 2017 was supposed to bring download and upload speeds of 10Gbps, and the cablevision industry unveiled a "10G" marketing campaign in January 2019 to boast of those symmetrical 10Gbps speeds. Comcast today chosen its newest test "an important step forward on the path to 10G."

The full-duplex version of DOCSIS 3.i was updated and renamed "DOCSIS four.0." Despite the "full duplex" proper noun, the cable industry has lowered the estimated upstream speeds from 10Gbps to 6Gbps.

"Current DOCSIS 3.1 cablevision modems back up capacities upwardly to 5Gbps downstream and i.5Gbps upstream," the cable-industry group CableLabs says. "DOCSIS iv.0 cable modems will support capacities up to 10Gbps downstream and 6Gbps upstream."

Comcast said that a "key advantage of DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex is that it establishes a foundation for operators to evangelize multigigabit speeds over their existing networks to the connections already in hundreds of millions of homes around the globe, without the need for massive digging and construction projects." Comcast called information technology "a powerful new tool to support our mission of delivering the all-time possible connected experiences to our customers," but it didn't say when those customers will be able to buy a future "full duplex" service.

Smaller upload increment possibly on tap

Comcast in October 2020 said it achieved a "technical milestone" that delivered ane.25Gbps download and upload speeds over existing cable wires during testing at a home in Jacksonville, Florida. While gigabit upload speeds over cable would be a massive comeback, information technology likely isn't anywhere shut to being implemented. It's besides not clear when Comcast will raise cable upload speeds to anything higher than 35Mbps—Comcast hasn't even confirmed an increase to 50Mbps uploads, which is already offered by WOW on that company'south gigabit-download program.

Currently, Comcast's 25Mbps download plan comes with 3Mbps uploads; the 100Mbps and 200Mbps download plans both accept 5Mbps uploads; the 400Mbps download plan has 10Mbps uploads; the 800Mbps program has 15Mbps uploads; and the 1Gbps download programme (1.2Gbps in some areas) comes with 35Mbps uploads. By contrast, cobweb-to-the-home providers generally provide symmetrical upload and download speeds of up to 1Gbps.

Comcast did hint at college upload speeds "in the near term" using DOCSIS 3.1, merely it didn't specify what those speeds will be or say when they will be bachelor:

Even as Comcast works to examination and deploy Full Duplex DOCSIS to enable multigigabit upload and download speeds in the future, the company is leveraging the technologies from the October trial, forth with DOCSIS three.ane in the upstream, to increment speed and chapters in the near term.

The October 2020 test "deliver[ed] 1.25 Gig symmetrical speeds over a live, all-digital network past leveraging advances in Distributed Access Architecture, Remote PHY digital nodes, and a deject-based virtualized cablevision modem termination system platform," Comcast said. In the more recent test announced today, the demonstration occurred in a "false" environment instead of a abode.

"Comcast technologists in Philadelphia and Denver conducted the test past installing the Broadcom SOC in a false network environment to rails the performance of its Full Duplex DOCSIS features—including echo counterfoil and overlapping spectrum—which combine to support substantial improvements in network throughput," Comcast said.

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Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/comcast-touts-4gbps-cable-uploads-in-lab-test-still-limits-users-to-35mbps/

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