BOSTON -- The Cable Show -- Engineers from Arris Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ARRS), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Motorola Mobility LLC have joined forces to refresh cable's Docsis platform and put it on a path that, they claim, could achieve a capacity of 10Gbit/s in the downstream and 2Gbit/s in the upstream.

That would blow the latest generation of Docsis 3.0 technology out of the water. Here at the show, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) is previewing its new Puma6 family of chips, including a "media gateway" configuration that bonds 24 downstream channels and eight upstream channels -- enough to produce speed bursts of almost 1Gbit/s downstream and 320Mbit/s upstream. (See Intel's New Docsis 3.0 Chip Guns for 1-Gig .)

John Chapman, the CTO of Cisco's cable access business unit, presented the ideas here Tuesday, offering a condensed version of a 182-page paper co-authored by the vendors, which compete in the market for Docsis cable modems and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs).

The paper's stated aim was to give the cable industry recommendations on how to develop a new generation of Docsis as cable operators start to migrate all of their services to IP.

But there's a bit more to the agenda, as the vendors also have a vested interest in protecting their hold on the Docsis equipment market as other potential technical options begin to emerge, particularly EPON Protocol Over Coax (EPoC), an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) standard in the works that's looking to bring PON-like performance to hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks. (See The Docsis Addendum and EPON-Over-Coax Starts Its Standards Journey .)

The Docsis vendors listed out 10 areas of consensus that, they believe, could start to redefine Docsis and create a roadmap that would enable the platform to achieve the kind of speed performance that EPoC is also shooting for. Here are a few ideas in which Arris, Cisco and Motorola are in agreement:

Chapman didn't take any direct shots at EPoC, but did call Docsis "the most successful Ethernet-over-coax technology to date."

And he argued that Docsis can be molded into something that can handle cable's future performance requirements, so long as the industry agrees to commit to a new roadmap and set to work on it soon. "Docsis can be anything the Docsis community wants or needs it to be," Chapman concluded.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable