coverstory_cover story 09/05/2014 18:46 Page 4
– and because its
benefits are significant,
we are seeing the
industry trying to make
DOCSIS 3.1 happen
faster, not slower. Some
of the ongoing work is
around how to simplify
and coordinate the
specific DOCSIS 3.1
launch configurations across multiple
operators to allow a faster market
introduction.”
“The decision to adapt to DOCSIS 3.1 will
largely be a business decision by the
respective operator who will have to decide if
they want to make the investment to go to
DOCSIS 3.1 or not,” advises Celebi. “While
we see no technical hurdles for the general
roll out of the standard, there are always
issues surrounding availability of the
chipsets. Outside of this, there is no reason
why the standard should not be incorporated
if the business case stacks up.” Elemental’s
Nemeth suggests that DOCSIS 3.1 will mostly
be used for expanding bandwidth through
the use of QAM bonding. “So roll-out will be
largely driven by increased bandwidth
requirements.”
UNCLEAR. Although implementation timescales remain unclear, should the industry be
looking ahead to the next iterations of
DOCSIS and HEVC? Baumann and Reinart
agree that it is a general truth that all of our
technology cycles are accelerating, “but given
that we are at the very early stages of both
DOCSIS 3.1 and HEVC, we probably
shouldn’t expect to see the next iterations of
these standards begin to materialise before
2017 or 2018,” they say.
“Because these infrastructure components
touch every aspect of delivery, it’s important
for developers to start building in support
early on,” suggests Dale, noting that Kaltura
has already begun testing HEVC and 4K
delivery in the context of content partners
targeting delivery to specific 4K devices.
“H.264 has been around for 11 years. I think
we can expect a similar long device upgrade
cycle for 4K and for new generation video
codecs to become universally available,” he
says.
According to Trow, for DOCSIS, the major
issue is pushing RF deeper into the network
to take advantage of the advanced
modulation schemes offered by DOCSIS 3.1.
“Such distributed access architectures will
allow the benefits of higher order modulation
schemes to be deployed. Future
standardisation work may include further
systemising a distributed architecture,
something that is vendor specific at the
“It would be easy to
say that 4K is the
main driver for
HEVC.”
Damien Lucas,
ANEVIA
technology as well.”
Answering in the affirmative, Dale, says it
is important to note that DOCSIS 3.0 is
already widely deployed, and already
supports speeds of up to 1 Gbps, “but you
don’t see many cable operators selling these
types of speeds today,” he notes, adding that
there are additional business impediments
that have slowed the widespread support for
ultra-broadband speeds. “Beyond technical
availability, and spectrum assignment on
cable lines, which needs to be refuted with
both 3 and 3.1 DOCSIS, the slow adoption of
fast Internet is largely related to the local
monopolies that don’t face significant
competition or customers that don’t see
value in additional bandwidth,” he advises.
Trow suggests such delays are driven by
availability of silicon for both consumer
devices and head-end infrastructure. “Once
available, silicon will allow the use of higher
order modulation schemes, enabling
operators to get more out of existing
frequency allocations. It is expected that
commercial products