Arris and Kabel Deutschland proved there’s plenty of mileage left in DOCSIS 3.0 by reaching a downstream speed of 4.7 Gbps in a field trial that used existing standards, technology and hardware.
Arris and Kabel Deutschland, the latter of which is Germany’s largest cable operator, conducted the trial at a school in the city of Schwerin, Germany. The school’s cable plant was recently upgraded to 862 MHz.
The trial featured Arris’ C4 cable modem termination system (CMTS) and 12 Arris Touchstone Cable Modem CM820Ss – each accessing eight bonded 8 MHz channels – to deliver 4.7 Gbps of aggregated data throughput in the downstream. The EuroDOCSIS standard uses 8 MHz, as opposed to the 6 MHz that DOCSIS uses in North America.
“Our field test with Arris, with an aggregate download capacity of well over 4 Gbps, was a complete success and underlines the unique selling proposition of our cable network as the only extensive, ultra-fast network in the German broadband market,” said KD CTO Lorenz Glatz. “Using this technology, a feature-length movie could theoretically be downloaded in eight seconds – at speeds faster than a standard laptop or modem can even process – demonstrating that today’s broadband cable network is already a high-performance and sustainable infrastructure offering huge untapped potential.”
Kabel Deutschland has been an Arris CMTS customer since 2007.
“This demonstrates that today’s HFC plant has the capacity to deliver a full IP video load, and that the entire HFC plant can be converted into one or more enormous pipes to meet future consumer bandwidth demands, using current technology and networks,” said Arris CTO Tom Cloonan. “We congratulate Kabel Deutschland on pushing through existing barriers to deliver their customers the services of tomorrow today.”
Kabel Deutschland operates cable networks in 13 German federal states and supplies its services to approximately 8.7 million connected households. The cable operator offers its subscribers digital, high-definition and analog TV; pay-TV and DVR products and services; video-on-demand; broadband Internet (up to 100 Mbps); and fixed-line phone services via cable, as well as mobile services in cooperation with an industry partner.
At last week’s Cable Show in Boston, cable operator and vendor panelists discussed various options to increase data speeds moving forward, including the extension of DOCSIS, EPON and Ethernet PON over Coax (EPoC).
Today’s news of the trial followed on the heels of Verizon announcing yesterday that it would deploy a fiber-based broadband tier with 300 Mbps down and 65 Mbps up in the majority of its footprint in the United States.
