Insight Communications confirmed this morning that it is testing a high-speed Internet service with a download speed of 100 Mbps.
Insight spokeswoman Sandy Colony said the test is being conducted in a physician’s office in Louisville, Kentucky.
While Clough was unable to confirm that a DOCSIS 3.0-enabled wideband modem was being used in the test, it’s hard to imagine otherwise given that broadband speeds with fiber are currently topping out around 50 Mbps.
Currently, Insight’s fastest deployed download speed is 20 Mbps. Clough said there wasn’t a timetable for additional tests or deployments, and she declined to identify the vendor of the modem being used in the Louisville test. Insight is the nation’s 10th largest cable operator.
So far this year, Videotron and Comcast have deployed wideband-enabled deployments of DOCSIS 3.0. Comcast rolled out wideband, channel-bonded services first in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and then to its New England region, parts of New Jersey and its home base of Philadelphia.
DOCSIS 3.0 can achieve downstream broadband speeds of up to 160 Mbps by bonding 6 MHz – or in the case of Europe and some parts of Asia and Latin America, 8 MHz – channels together. DOCSIS upstream channel bonding, which will be deployed after downstream channel bonding, can provide up to 120 Mbps of shared throughput for cable operators.
Current requirements for DOCSIS 3.0 call for equipment to support channel bonding on at least four upstream and four downstream channels, although the platform gives operators the flexibility to bond as few as two channels to meet market needs and competition. DOCSIS 3.0’s speeds are limited only by the number of bonded channels, so as DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem technology continues to evolve, the ability to support more and more bonded channels will be the result. Channels used for bonding don’t need to be adjacent.
Large cable operators such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable are expected to rollout the faster DOCSIS 3.0 channel-bonded services in areas where they’re competing head-to-head with Verizon’s FiOS service.
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