- Commercial DOCSIS 4.0 rollouts are limited but the tech is ready, said Harmonic SVP Asaf Matatyaou
- Operators still have work to do in upgrading their plants and customer premises equipment (CPE)
- Matatyaou thinks “unified” DOCSIS 4.0 will make it easier for operators to upgrade
DOCSIS 4.0 is steadily moving from lab trials to real-world deployments, and Harmonic is one of the players leading the charge in the cable industry.
Harmonic provides distributed access architecture (DAA) technology, a virtual cable modem termination service (vCMTS) and other products that aim to help operators upgrade their networks to the multi-gig speeds of DOCSIS 4.0. Deployments are still in their early days, but the tech is here and gaining more traction among operators, according to Harmonic SVP of Broadband Products Asaf Matatyaou.
“Deployments are starting and with paying subscribers, which means that all the pieces that are required to deploy 4.0 are in place or being put in place,” he told Fierce.
So far, Comcast and Mediacom are the only cable operators that are commercially rolling out DOCSIS 4.0. Mediacom just announced it expanded DOCSIS 4.0 to its Illinois market using gear from ATX, Harmonic and Hitron. Others, like Charter, Cox and Rogers, are conducting field trials but haven’t publicly announced deployments.
There are also plenty of operators that haven’t announced plans for DOCSIS 4.0, “and you could sense they’re looking for proof points,” Matatyaou said. “It’s in a lot of different labs. There are lot of operators of varying different sizes in different regions that are excited about 4.0.”
DOCSIS 4.0 is geared toward enabling next-gen cable services, but it doesn’t mean operators need to pick and choose between hybrid-fiber coax(HFC) and fiber. “We’re not here to give folks either/or, we give the ability to do both,” he said.
Considering both HFC and fiber are capable of symmetrical multi-gig speeds, the average customer “probably doesn’t even know what wire is actually hitting their CPE,” Matatyaou pointed out. “So, speed to market is really important, it’s a faster rollout than fiber overbuilds,” and operators can deliver those speeds at “a fraction of the cost.”
Indeed, the major cable cos expect relatively inexpensive DOCSIS 4.0 rollouts, as Charter and Comcast estimated their cost per home passed to be as low as $100 and $200, respectively. Whereas fiber’s deployment cost is typically in the thousand-dollar range or higher, depending on how rural the market is and whether underground deployment is required.
The challenge with upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0
Despite DOCSIS 4.0’s potential for higher speeds and lower build costs, Matatyaou acknowledged that challenges remain for the industry.
“A lot of due diligence has happened in labs and with the interoperability between cores and CPEs and amplifiers,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there’s outdoor work that needs to be done.”
For instance, operators looking to increase their spectrum pipe from 1.2GHz to 1.8GHz (i.e., Extended Spectrum DOCSIS 4.0) need to make sure their outside plant is ready for the task.
“Typically those new areas of the plant and spectrum that have been unused before might have impairments and other noise conditions that the operator might be new to,” Matatyaou explained.
He added Harmonic has AI-based software, such as its Beacon Intelligent Speed Maximizer, that can measure these new plant areas and then “adapt dynamically and automatically to those conditions with the right exact per subscriber capabilities.”
The other challenge, which comes with the development of any new technology, is “the CPE ecosystem maturity.”
In other words, as vendors make the customer premises gear for DOCSIS 4.0, “there’s always a period of working out and upgrading software to make sure that great interoperability becomes perfect interoperability,” said Matatyaou. It’s about “trying to be transparent that the technology is ready” and that it can actually make the customer’s experience “as seamless as possible.”
It may be a while before cable vendors see revenue growth from DOCSIS 4.0. Operators are holding back on purchasing more gear until “unified” DOCSIS 4.0 chips become widely available, according to Dell’Oro.
What is “unified” DOCSIS 4.0 – and why it matters
Unified DOCSIS 4.0, which is currently being developed by Broadcom, Charter and Comcast, essentially combines the ESD and full-duplex (FDX) methods of DOCSIS 4.0 deployment. Matatyaou said the unified approach gives operators flexibility in whether they want to expand spectrum capacity to 1.8GHz, stick with the 1.2GHz-sized pipe(which is what FDX does) or both, depending on where they’re upgrading the network.
“It’s a great opportunity to understand, through software and through configuration and through usage patterns, how to maximize the speeds that are being delivered over the pipe,” he said.
Harmonic announced this week that Mediacom’s Illinois upgrade marked the first time unified DOCSIS 4.0 tech has been deployed on a live network.
In Matatyaou's view, unified DOCSIS 4.0 matters because operators don’t need to “decide upfront” what they want, and they can adjust the technology to a specific part of their footprint. He added it is likely each operator will choose to run ESD or FDX as their "mode" of operation, but they will have the ability to change that mode without getting new equipment.
“Many operators have a mixture of [DOCSIS and fiber] footprints,” he said, ranging from rural to urban as well as some combination of greenfield and brownfield deployments. “Having the option, through configuration and software on the same, identical solution [to] support all those varieties of footprints is, I think, very important, because you don’t have any regrettable spend.”
This story was updated to clarify Matatyaou's comments about unified DOCSIS 4.0