DOCSIS 3.1 ‘ahead of schedule’

Phil McKinney

Development of the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard is tracking “slightly ahead of schedule,” with the first commercial deployments now expected in the latter half of 2015, according to CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney.

Speaking at Cable Congress in Amsterdam, McKinney said that the first hardware compatible with DOCSIS 3.1 is expected this year, with field deployments to start in 2015, followed by commercial deployments – ahead of the previously anticipated 2016 rollout.

McKinney said that CableLabs – which merged last year with the technical standards body for European cable, EuroCableLabs – is also working to accelerate the rate at which it innovates and deploys new standards.

“If you look at every generation of DOCSIS prior to 3.1, each took four and a half years – from the time we started working on that version until commercial deployment. In the innovation game, that’s three Moore’s Laws. You’re roadkill at three Moore’s Laws,” said McKinney.

“DOCSIS 3.1 we’re going to do in just slightly over two years. We’ve cut 50% of the time out of getting it through the process, getting the vendor support, working it through, managing it through the process to make it available for all of our members to deploy that.”

“We may be thinking we’re running at a pretty good pace. Next year we’re going to have to run even faster,” he added.

CableLabs, the US-based non-profit research and development consortium, in October launched the specifications for DOCSIS 3.1, technology that it says will “enable a new generation of cable services”.
DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to help TV operators meet consumer demand for high speed connections and sophisticated applications and provide new value for cable operators and consumers of broadband services.