Ops Don’t Feel 1.1 Pressure
By KAREN BROWN -- Multichannel News, 9/23/2001 8:00:00 PM
DOCSIS 1.1 may be ready, but are cable operators willing or able to adopt it? That's the big question as reports circulate that Cable Television Laboratories Inc. will announce the first Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification 1.1-certified products later this week.
How quickly MSOs adopt this upgraded cable-modem technology — which adds data prioritization and guaranteed bandwidth quality-of-service — depends on what gets certified, according to those involved.
Cox Communications Inc. is among the cable operators awaiting the outcome of a prolonged DOCSIS 1.1 certification wave. It has already started to test several modems and cable modem termination systems in its labs.
"A lot of that has to do with taking a little bit of a gamble and spending some resources on evaluating equipment that is not yet DOCSIS-qualified," said Cox manager of data technology Michael Hale. "So it is usually the vendors that we currently do business with. When they submit to CableLabs, we ask for the same equipment and we run our tests in parallel with [the] CableLabs process. If they get certified, then we are ahead of the curve."
If that takes place, Hale said it could take a little more than five weeks to deploy DOCISIS 1.1 modems in the field. Upgrading older modems may also require a software download, rather than a massive hardware swap.
"There's a theory that we can successfully upgrade all of our cable modems out in the field," Hale said. "We've been very adamant about deploying only DOCSIS 1.1-upgradeable modems out in the field."
Charter Communications Inc. also has been waiting for the DOCSIS 1.1 upgrade. In the near term, certified gear won't tempt the MSO to go on a major buying spree.
"All of the modems we have bought in the past year are 1.1-capable," said Don Loheide, director of staff engineering. "It's pretty much a software upgrade to support the quality of service features of DOCSIS 1.1."
Charter primarily uses Cisco Systems Inc. gear. Even if Cisco is not among the first certified, Loheide said, the MSO won't be at a disadvantage because DOCSIS 1.1 is not crucial to existing data-only products.
"Right now our backbones are not oversubscribed by any means, so quality-of-service — in a lot of respects right now — is kind of just overhead to us, because if your pipes aren't full, riding priorities on traffic through the pipes doesn't matter," he said.
Cox and Charter do see DOCSIS 1.1 as crucial to new tiered enterprise and Internet-protocol cable telephony offerings, which require its data prioritization and quality-of-service. That's probably where the new spec will first see action.
"That's where it really comes into play on the business side and the voice side, and setting that traffic as priority traffic," Loheide said. "Those are our largest systems where we have looked to do those trials and roll out those services, and that's where we'd look to do the upgrade to 1.1."
MSOs have dabbled with offering tiered services at different speeds, but "there's no guarantee, there's no minimum level of service," Hale noted. "It's still kind of this best-effort mentality, so DOCSIS 1.1 is going to allow us to deploy that in a more mature fashion, so we can offer a minimum level of service to our higher tiers and commercial tiers and have more flexibility with more competitive products."
But Hale and Loheide caution that it will take more than a single certified cable modem to put DOCSIS 1.1 in the field.
"There would have to be enough of a total platform for us to go gung-ho with it," Hale said. "So that means the CMTS and multiple cable modems would have to be available, certified."
Loheide agreed. "I don't know how CableLabs is going to certify modems without certifying a couple of CMTSs," he noted. "So I would imagine they would have to have at least two modems and at least two CMTSs that they can certify so that everything interoperates with each other."
Even if DOCSIS 1.1 gear were to be certified later this week, an AT&T Broadband spokeswoman said, it would take a few quarters to test and deploy such systems in the field. The MSO also is not planning to use the technology in its upcoming trial of multiple ISP access in Boston, she added.
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