Should telcos fear DOCSIS 3.0?

Cable TV operator support for DOCSIS 3.0 trials and commercial roll-outs has been building for months. Nearly all the major cable players have their plans together, and though some are being aggressive and others conservative, it seems like DOCSIS 3.0-based broadband will soon become a big competitive factor.

Still, at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Nashville this week, Jim Farmer, chief network architect for Enablence's Wave7 FTTx networks division and a noted cable industry technologist, questioned the potential impact of DOCSIS 3.0. He said that putting much more bandwidth downstream also limits the ability to provide more TV channels. He also said that many cable TV companies will not be able to take advantage of the standard's greatest potential benefits when paired with MPEG-4 because they still have such a large base of MPEG 2 gear in the market.

For more:
- see this coverage at Telephony

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