CableLabs to host '10G Showcase' on April 27

DOCSIS 4.0 and the cable industry's broader "10G" initiative is getting ready for its closeup.

CableLabs is set to host a "10G Showcase" next month that will comprise strategy discussions, technology presentations and live demonstrations, the organization confirmed to Light Reading. The private, hybrid event, set for April 27, will be held at the CableLabs facility in Louisville, Colorado. CableLabs is also exploring a similar 10G-focused event with the media but has yet to finalize details.

Figure 1: The cable industry introduced its 10G initiative, logo included, at the 2019 CES in Las Vegas.
(Source: NCTA and CableLabs)

CableLabs declined to reveal the full agenda for next month's 10G Showcase, but industry sources said the event is expected to show off technologies and products that support both options for DOCSIS 4.0: Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) and Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX).

ESD, also referred to as Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD), envisions a capacity upgrade to 1.8GHz while keeping the downstream and upstream traffic operating in separate spectrum. FDX, an option championed by Comcast, would operate on a 1.2GHz hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network and support an FDX band (residing at 108MHz-684MHz) that allows upstream and downstream data traffic to run in the same block of spectrum.

Either option will put cable operators in position to deliver multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds along with enhanced security and low-latency capabilities.

DOCSIS 4.0 is a cornerstone of 10G, an initiative introduced at the 2019 CES. But 10G is agnostic in that it also considers fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) and wireless access technologies.

It's not yet clear how FTTP and wireless will factor into the live demos at next month's 10G Showcase, but Comcast EVP and Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi said in his keynote this week at Light Reading's annual next-gen cable tech event that the operator's road to 10G includes both FTTP and DOCSIS 4.0.

Figure 2: CableLabs will host the 10G Showcase at its facilities in Louisville, Colorado.
(Source: CableLabs. Used with permission)

While full details of the 10G Showcase haven't been made public, the event is another indicator that the cable industry is making progress with DOCSIS 4.0 amid recent lab trials touted by Comcast and Charter Communications.

The 10G Showcase comes about 18 months after Mediacom Communications, CableLabs and NCTA hosted a "10G Smart Home" in Ames, Iowa, which demonstrated a blend of bandwidth-intensive applications, including 8K video and a light field display. That demo featured a DOCSIS 3.1 network upgraded to 1.2GHz, a distributed access architecture with remote PHY nodes, and the use of a high-split that boosted the amount of spectrum dedicated to the upstream to a range of 5MHz-204MHz (versus a legacy range of 5MHz-45MHz).

By most estimates, DOCSIS 4.0 won't be ready for commercial deployment until at least 2023. In the meantime, there's continued interest in pushing the limits of DOCSIS 3.1 by combining an upgrade to 1.2GHz with an upstream-expanding high-split.

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading