One Step Closer To Getting 10 Gigabit At Home 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Now, thanks to Comcast and Broadcom, we're seeing the first tests of full-duplex (FDX) DOCSIS 4 system-on-chip (SoC) devices. Comcast's tests, done between Philadelphia and Denver, show that FDX can work with DOCSIS 4. FDX enables cable internet providers to run a high-speed internet connection both upstream and downstream simultaneously. In other words, while you won't see symmetric speeds, you will someday see 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream over Comcast's hybrid-fiber coaxial (HFC) network. Comcast has been working towards this for years. The company has been working to bring DOCSIS 4 FDX to market pretty much since CableLabs' set the specification in 2017.
There is another way to deliver DOCSIS 4 speeds: Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD). This is easier to deploy since it "only" raises to 1.8Gbps while keeping downstream and upstream traffic separate as has been the case with previous DOCSIS versions. Comcast, though, is investing heavily in chasing the top price of 10Gbps. It's possible that a single chipset could support both FDX and ESD, but we're still years away from that silicon being forged. [...] In the tests, which use experimental Broadcom SoCs, in a simulated network environment, they hit speeds of over 4Gbps both up and downstream simultaneously. This was done using DOCSIS 4's echo cancellation and overlapping spectrum techniques. The businesses expect future optimization to push the throughput even faster. We still don't know when these speeds will arrive in our small offices/home offices (SOHO). CableLabs doesn't even expect to test hardware for DOCSIS 4 certification until 2022. Nor, has Comcast announced any kind of deployment roadmap.
There is another way to deliver DOCSIS 4 speeds: Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD). This is easier to deploy since it "only" raises to 1.8Gbps while keeping downstream and upstream traffic separate as has been the case with previous DOCSIS versions. Comcast, though, is investing heavily in chasing the top price of 10Gbps. It's possible that a single chipset could support both FDX and ESD, but we're still years away from that silicon being forged. [...] In the tests, which use experimental Broadcom SoCs, in a simulated network environment, they hit speeds of over 4Gbps both up and downstream simultaneously. This was done using DOCSIS 4's echo cancellation and overlapping spectrum techniques. The businesses expect future optimization to push the throughput even faster. We still don't know when these speeds will arrive in our small offices/home offices (SOHO). CableLabs doesn't even expect to test hardware for DOCSIS 4 certification until 2022. Nor, has Comcast announced any kind of deployment roadmap.
Thats a lot of telemetry! (Score:2)
6 Gps up? That's a lot of telemetry. Somehow I think Microsoft and Google would choke on that much.
Re: Thats a lot of telemetry! (Score:1)
Good. Let's flood their systems with useless data noise.
Re: The era of coax is over (Score:1)
Pretty sure 10g down and 6g up is not the same as the limitations on pstn lines.
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The point is that fiber will outscale the crap out of cable, just as cable outscaled the crap out of DSL.
Before you were in a position of being "stuck" with DSL if you couldn't get cable. These days you're "stuck" with cable if you can't get fiber.
Because so much of what I do is online for work and other things, a huge motivator for me buying a newly constructed house was that it would have access to symmetric gig fiber for $65/month, and no more crappy cable with its shitty latency, shitty packet loss, and
Re: The era of coax is over (Score:1)
Yea, so upgrade when necessary. That way the infrastructure tech that only gets upgraded a couple times a century is the latest when it's needed, rather than already halfway to obsolete when it first gets used.
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Most cable companies have got hybrid fibre in the ground for a long time by now, this upgrade is relatively cheap for them ... and the mere threat of it will keep fibre deployments from getting off the ground, because they will be able to undercut them.
If fibre can't offer a performance advantage or a cost advantage, what's the point?
Re:The era of coax is over (Score:5, Interesting)
Fiber will inevitably end up offering both a performance advantage and a cost advantage, mainly because what Comcast is doing here pretty much hits the limit of what you'll realistically get with coax, kind of like dialup and 56k. Comcast was the only one that wanted FSD because they maintained their infrastructure well enough to be able to support that. The rest of them fought against FSD because their copper side royally sucks balls, and they instead lobbied for ESD, which doesn't need as good of a signal. This is how DOCSIS 4 ended up having both in the spec. While RG6 coax can go all the way up to 3ghz and ESD only goes up to 1.8ghz, it's not going to be terribly realistic to go beyond that, even for Comcast, without bringing fiber pretty much all the way to the customer premises and doing RFoG the rest of the way. At which point, why bother?
Fiber will carry the cost advantage even in the short term in most markets, mainly because in order to support FSD, most cable companies would end up having to rip out most of the last mile anyways. Without FSD, their upstream is going to remain shit overall, which is bad because regular consumers are starting to use a lot more upstream than they have in the past. Comcast being the notable exception, except in the long term (say 15+ years.)
Meanwhile, existing GPON last mile networks can easily upgrade to NG-PON2, which outscales the crap out of what DOCSIS 4 can do, and that still won't come anywhere close to hitting the limits of what PON fiber can do.
Cable is probably going to be squeezed out of the market in the 15 year span, namely because all of the wireless providers are going to take away their lower tier customers, while fiber takes away all of their more spendy customers.
Re: The era of coax is over (Score:2)
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PON uses a prism to split a single (not a pair) fiber strand across anywhere between 16 and 64 homes, though (IIRC) 32 is the most common; though it's not a loop like DSL. One channel (color) is used for upstream, and another channel (a different color) is used for downstream on the same strand to your ONT; it isn't like the fiber you're used to in a typical datacenter where you have one strand for egress and another for ingress. GPON does something like (can't recall the exact number off the top of my head
The era of mystery competition is over (Score:2)
Ummm, their WHAT again? Are you sure you know what a monopoly is?
Re: The era of coax is over (Score:1)
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For how many minutes? (Score:4, Informative)
Awesome! Now we can use up our 1.2 TB data cap in only 16 minutes! Thanks, Comcast! That's Comcastic!
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Now we can use up our 1.2 TB data cap in only 16 minutes!
With Municipal Fiber gaining traction around the country, it may not be much longer until fiber to the home starts becoming the norm rather than the exception. The fiber was just run to my house, and the final installation is on the docket in a month (longer than I thought).
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Don't complain thanks to the Australia government I can expect to get that speed on my HFC network sometime in the next five decades ago (oh wait I am sixty and be dead before whom ever is living in my exhome gets that speed), top job, Australia and only fifty billion dollars spent on a network they can not sell because it is CRAP but really really profitable for the corrupt mates of the corrupt Liberal Party, who got to do the entire build out at maintenance rates, 50% profit rather than 5% on tender, ohh
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You have HFC? Luxury.
My top floor flat still has ADSL, with a fibre to the curb FTTC rollout later in the year - Uncle Scotty from marketing can't be bothered rewiring the building.
Instead of that shit, I'm just tethering to a 4G phone, streaming content in 640Ã--360 and hoping 5G rollout will include more data someday.
Asymmetric to the max (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, I have Comcast's 400/10 Mbps plan so that's a 40:1 asymmetry ratio. They keep trying to sell me faster and faster downlinks and I don't care about that; it's fast enough. I care about an increased uplink because a 1.25 mb/s upload speed sucks rocks. I particularly laugh at them when they mention "cloud" or "video."
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I wish you could choose how they divide the up and downstream channels. Like you I'd gladly trade some download speed for a decent upload rate.
All this hybrid crap is just trying to wring a bit more profit out of an old network. We just need fibre everywhere. Japan has fibre and the baseline speed in major cities is 10,000/10,000 symmetrical. Most PCs don't have a 10G port and neither do consumer routers. In fact just finding a consumer grade route that can hit 1Gbps is no simple task. It's great because yo
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I care about an increased uplink because a 1.25 mb/s upload speed sucks rocks. I particularly laugh at them when they mention "cloud" or "video."
I see that in other parts of the world too, and let's face it that is largely driven by consumer demand. Downloads are on demand, uploads however are largely background activities. If a movie is buffering or the user is twiddling their thumbs waiting for another 50GB game patch to come down it affects them directly. If on the other hand they just saved a movie, then background cloud synchronisation will do its thing while they move on with their lives. Same with social media, when you start the upload there
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It is slightly hilarious when LTE gives me more that 50% of the upload speed of Comcast, but only slightly.
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Is *is* asymmetric, but for a reason.
As much as it is painful to admit, the Internet is no longer a democratic peer-to-peer network. Now when you access the DNS servers, look up a website, download a system update, it no longer goes to "the Internet", but rather is served from a CDN cache in your ISP's datacenters. Even non-static pages will be served from "edge cloud", which is a fancy term for colocation (again in the same ISP datacenter).
So there is no more "symmetry", since your "upload" speed is limite
You'll never see it actually deployed (Score:2)
Comcast et. al. will never make the investment to make this a commercial product, unless they can charge astronomical rates for it. They've got a stranglehold on their subscribers, so you'll never actually see these kinds of speeds for a reasonable price.
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I may be talking out of my backside, but it seems to me that it's encryption + digital.
It has to decrypt, then find keyframes.
I cut the cord when they started needlessly encrypting local channels on the cheapest tier.
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Will we still share bandwidth with neighbors? (Score:2)
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I have FiOS and it's always shared with the neighbors. You don't notice any difference in speeds at any time even at the end of a dead-end street.
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What I want to know is (Score:2)
Can I get Home at 10Gb/s?
It'll take until the heat-death of the universe to beam back to Sirius 2b at that speed.
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So you're saying it's inevitable, you just have to wait. You're an optimist!
10G Equipment Still Expensive (Score:2)
I trust Comcast about as far as I can throw a cheesecake underwater.
More interesting to me is when 10G home networking gear will finally become affordable. While individual 10G-capable NICs are finally within reach, 10G switches are still annoyingly pricey. The cheapest 10G switch I'm aware of is a little 5-port unit from MikroTik [mikrotik.com], and it's USD$150.00. And that's before you buy the SFP+ modules (many of which have a nasty habit of being vendor-locked).
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I think the main advantage is that you can have many devices all using up to 10 Gb in total. 1 Gb bidirectional will fit most home users use cases, but 10 Gb allows multiple devices to use their full bandwidth all at the same time. There are some use cases for 10 Gb on a single device, but by the time those really come along and get popular, the hardware will get cheaper.
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I have been considering > 1G since that MikroTik router became available. As long as the distance requirements are not great, passive SFP+ cables are the least expensive option.
I'm sorry to break it to you... (Score:2)
...but 10G to the home is already a mainstream service in developed nations.
Re: I'm sorry to break it to you... (Score:1)
Here's two examples:
https://www.au.com/internet/au... [au.com]
https://www.nuro.jp/10g/ [www.nuro.jp]
A 10G ONU is included as part of the standard service.
This is a mainstream consumer service. It costs around ¥5000-¥7000 per month plus installation fees. Of course, there's no 20th century style data caps or similar stupidity.
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Re: I'm sorry to break it to you... (Score:1)
Yes, the majority of the population in a first world country.
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Re: I'm sorry to break it to you... (Score:1)
It was available as a test in The Netherlands for a while as well, on regular ftth connections, in many places, including in this 160.000 people city and some much more sparsely populated areas.
The biggest fiber network that is quickly expanding is now doing 2.5gbit PON instead of dedicated fibers like they used to, in an effort to be as monopolistic as possible.
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It was available as a test in The Netherlands for a while as well, on regular ftth connections, in many places, including in this 160.000 people city and some much more sparsely populated areas.
The biggest fiber network that is quickly expanding is now doing 2.5gbit PON instead of dedicated fibers like they used to, in an effort to be as monopolistic as possible.
And it's not a standard. This one is showing the US is back to #1 again.
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"Under 500" is an understatement. I bought my 10G switch for $150 brand new. (Mikrotik CRS305)
Fios is still 1Gbps (Score:2)
If there were a good market reason to do it, the providers that are already running fibre to the home would be offering something above 1Gbps. They aren't. Verizon Fios is probably the largest fibre provider in the US, and they max out at 1Gb/s.
The issue here for them isn't the bandwidth of the connections from the home to their datacenters. It's the networking equipment. A 1Gb/s switch port is dirt cheap, and has been for a long time. It's also standard on desktop computers and WiFi routers. It's sti
Here's the catch: (Score:2)
This means advertised 10Gbps down / 6Gbps up will be more like 2.5Gbps down / 1.5Gbps up. Off-peak. In areas with brand-new infrastructure. Five or maybe six days of the week. Suspiciously, the only sites that will actually connect at these speeds are well-known speed testing sites and maybe Netflix and/or Youtube.
It will also only be available for people who are willing to "triple-bundle" TV and land phone, for $200/month (special introductory rate). The routers will be absolutely godawful. I'd sa
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Yeah, you've got it. "Designed in Philly With Love"..beta testing on customers, pushing out nightly builds. Ah damn yeah why did my cablemodem suddenly have to reboot at 2:30am and take me off line in the middle of an important meeting? For the 3rd time in a week? Agile, they call it.
If you go for a pure fibre ISP, w/o the TV package, stuff just works. But that's not even available for a lot of people, because Comcast is a monopoly power. Meanwhile, in Sauron Robert's lair in Center City...
with an 1.5 TB cap! (Score:2)
with an 1.5 TB cap!
What for? (Score:1)
The question says it all. What do you expect to be doing at 10Gbps that you can't do right now well enough?
I'd rather spend my money on other things tbh.
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It's not for you, human. It's for Skynet.
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As others pointed out, it is the increase in upload speed which would make the most difference. As it is now, I do not even consider cloud based backup services; they are completely useless.
Of course this is about capacity (Score:2)
it's not (directly) aimed at single user speed. The idea is mostly to squeeze more out of already existing segments without having to invest into making your segments smaller.
So this will essentially mean just less congestion on the last mile, not 10 Gigabit for the end user. Those 10 Gigabits are shared between hundreds if not thousands of users, depending on how large the segments are.
10 Gbit has been around a while (Score:3)
10 Gbit is already deployed in parts of Europe. It's expensive, â50 per month. But that's the price to stay at the cutting edge.
Of course, getting a home network that will actually manage to make use of that bandwidth is another issue. But that's getting solved as well.
https://www.bahnhof.se/akalla/... [bahnhof.se]
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" It's expensive, â50 per month" ::laughing-tears-emoji::
I can't get 0.5Gbps for that price from Comcast.
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Was going to say the same, here is an option available in some rural parts of England.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/in... [ispreview.co.uk]
Wat about 5G.6G and beyond (Score:2)
While Comcast, innovative and customer centric company they are, talk about this telcos are building out faster wireless networks. One advantage I see for wireless is the ability to reach customers at a much lower cost as no last mile cabling is needed. While there certainly are bandwidth and backhaul issues, in theory by adding devices you can increase a customer's capacity on demand only when needed. A receiver could be designed with multiple SIMs embedded to do the switching without end user action. A
Meh, people still DOCSIS? (Score:2)
yes, I know, they've got a lot invested in their metallic infrastructure. But Fiber is the way to go. In rural areas, DSL and Cable are horrible and expensive if available at all, but upstart all-fiber ISPs are lighting up the small towns and countryside at an alarming rate, providing reliable service for far less than Comcast (under $50 for 100 mbps). Of course, Starlink is the true competition in such places. Comcast and Verizon aren't really viable.
Don't need it (Score:2)
I don't need 10Gb. What I need is for wifi to work correctly at its advertised bandwidth. Even if the bandwidth is only 500Mbps.
That's cute, but.. (Score:2)
.. I can already get 10 gigabit service from my local ISP, USI Fiber
Instead of using shared medium technologies like GPON or PON they run an actual fiber strand from their central offices to each customer. Upgrading to 10GE is just a matter of swapping SFP's
Highly recommend if you're in Minneapolis. http://www.usifiber.com/ [usifiber.com]
Hmmm (Score:1)
If Only the government will get out of the way! (Score:1)
This makes sense given they can't make a profit on it and they already have poles and rights of way all the way to every home. Should be straight up simple.
BUT NO!