Comcast is prepping its South Florida system for the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 next year.
A Comcast spokesman said that the company is not commenting publicly on where DOCSIS 3.0 will be rolled out, on the speeds of the wideband data services or on the pricing, but Comcast CEO and President Brian Roberts said earlier this year that the company hopes to have elements of DOCSIS 3.0 in 20 percent of its footprint by the end of the year.
Roberts has said that Comcast expects channel bonding to increase download speeds to 100 Mbps within the next two years and even reach speeds of up to 160 Mbps farther down the road.
Comcast and other cable operators are looking to take advantage of the high speeds from channel bonding up to four channels. There have been many pre-DOCSIS 3.0 wideband deployments overseas in Asia and Europe by cable operators using three-channel modems, and last month Canada’s Videotron announced that it was offering customers wideband download speeds of up to 30 Mbps and 50 Mbps.
Comcast’s South Florida system made modifications in the last quarter of 2007 to increase its network bandwidth capabilities, with the end result being a one-third increase in capacity on the system.
The system is making additional modifications in anticipation of the DOCSIS 3.0 rollout next year.
“This new service will revolutionize the way our customers use their computers,” said Filemon Lopez, Comcast’s regional SVP for South Florida. “With all the emphasis being put on streaming video and gaming, DOCSIS 3.0 provides a virtual superhighway of Internet speed for our customers that will be hard to match by any competitors in our market.”
While Comcast isn’t saying what work is being done to upgrade the South Florida system, cable operators will need to do some headend reconfigurations and upgrade their cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) with hardware and software for DOCSIS 3.0.
Some industry experts think that Comcast and other cable operators in the U.S. will deploy the wideband services in areas where they compete against Verizon’s FiOS service.
With the additional bandwidth that was freed up last year, South Florida also announced that it will be offering the following six new high-definition (HD) channels in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties: Food Network HD, USA Network HD, Discovery Channel HD, Animal Planet HD and Sci-Fi HD.
Additionally, expanded HD choices are offered through Comcast’s video-on-demand (VOD) service.
“This is only phase one of our HD expansion plans this year,” Lopez said. “Customers have told us they value having a choice of HD programs instead of just having more HD channels. These additional channels and new Channel 1 on-demand selections allow customers to choose what HD programs or movies they want and view them at a time convenient for them.”
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