back to article CableLabs backhaul spec gets speed boost

Late last week, CableLabs launched another bandwidth-boosting project, this time designed to sweat more gigabits-per-second out of the optical leg of cable networks. The US cable industry's research arm launched its Full Duplex Coherent Optics project, designed to double the capacity of the upstream channels from HFC nodes to …

  1. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Netflix Video Compression

    A hour-long HD Netflix production could be easily compressed into about 1 kB. Just have an advanced computer at the subscriber end, and describe the general plotline in a few words, and let the computer generate the video locally.

    "54m12s of Swords and Skirts. Some light stabbing, gentle sex, a bit of frontal nudity female only, marital infidelity. Set in Rome circa 234AD. GO."

    And then a nice episode would come out of the HDMI port.

    1. Long John Brass
      Pirate

      Re: Netflix Video Compression

      Dude, have you been skimming my NetFlix feed :-O

  2. Neoc

    "on-off keying (OOK, as used in PON deployments)" The Librarian would be proud.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time for terabit DSL so competition is maintained

    Hopefully the guy basically who invented DSL and presented a paper last year outlining a way to do terabit DSL (that's at 100 meters IIRC, and still 10 gigabit a kilometer away!) is able to make that happen. Otherwise there is going to be a distinct lack of choice since fiber deployments in the US have slowed greatly the last few years as they've figured out running fiber to every house doesn't make economic sense unless they can do it while the houses are being built.

    Its either that, or hope fixed wireless 5G becomes very widespread very fast. Because the local cable monopolies that exist across most of the US will be a very big problem for pricing (and neutrality) in the future if not...

    1. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Re: Time for terabit DSL so competition is maintained

      DougS mentioned, "...a way to do terabit DSL (at 100 meters)..."

      Fiber is better. 'net says, "Google’s ‘FASTER’ undersea cable 60 Tbps ...uses six fiber pairs to push all that bandwidth using 100 different wavelengths of light. Every 60 kilometers, there’s a repeater..."

      We live in a forested neighbourhood with wooden telephone/power poles. Several miles from anywhere. Installing "the last mile" of fiber seemed to require only a few hours, in total. The fiber cables were being installed on the poles at about 10kmh, and the Safety Flag crew had given up trying to keep up. The flag crew were laying on the ground, in their orange vests, panting from exhaustion, and one of them (laying prostrated upon the ground) feebly waved a orange flag at me as I carefully drove past. The fiber truck was rolling along quickly. The guy 24-feet up in the rampaging bucket looked just a bit scared, as he assisted the fiber cable into position parallel to the old copper cables, with the spinning wire holder wire being wrapped around at about 5000 RPM.

      The 'Last Mile' is easy - YMMV.

      But yes, competition from faster DSL would be a very good thing. Unfortunately it's the very same company here.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Time for terabit DSL so competition is maintained

        Where do you live that the telco was willing to run MILES of fiber to service a single home? (I presume, unless you had a ton of neighbors that also were getting hooked up)

        Around here if you are more than a quarter mile off the cable company network you have to pay per foot (at some outrageous rate, a guy I know who lives in the sticks said they were quoted several thousand dollars to run the 2000 feet from the highway to their house, so he stuck with Directv for TV and a Verizon LTE router for internet) and the telcos would laugh at you if you suggested fiber. They'll only run copper because they are legally required to, but it only has to provide voice service they are under no obligation to make it provide serviceable DSL.

        Fiber is better, but totally unnecessary since 10 gigabit symmetric on cable HFC networks is here today (well at least possible where I live though while they've gone DOCSIS 3.1 I don't think they have the equipment for full duplex yet since only businesses would be interested in a speed like that) Fixed wireless 5G will offer gigabit symmetric in a few years and maybe terabit DSL too at least in some areas.

        Running fiber to the home costs about $1000 PER HOUSE to trench fiber from the curb in an existing neighborhood. The cable company is running aerial fiber in areas with poles since it is armored (and as a result very expensive, but that's necessary due to the potential for overhead lines to come down due to icing) but all telco fiber plus any fiber going to homes from the one regional LEC doing fiber in a nearby town is 100% underground. You won't lay that at 10 kph, it would take months or quite possibly over a year to run a few miles depending on how many other buried services there are, what roads/waterways had to be crossed if they have a conduit path, etc. To get fiber at my business it took two years for them to run the last mile, though I'm sure it wouldn't have been quite that long if they'd made it their #1 priority to run that last mile down a major highway.

  4. JezNZ

    Sexy

    I'm going to use that term in the future - “direction-division multiplexing” sounds way better than "half-duplex"...

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