After interviewing Chris Kohler about the modems that passed CableLabs Cert Wave 58, it seemed only fair to talk with Motorola’s Mike Cookish as well about the bronze DOCSIS 3.0 qualification of Motorola’s cable modem termination system (CMTS). The interview is about 16 minutes long and fairly technical, so for those of you not interested in listening to the whole thing, there are a few choice quotes below the audio link.
On DOCSIS 3.0 speeds:
“Our customer J:COM in Japan on April 25th just launched a 160-megabit service.”
On DOCSIS 3.0 in the US:
“My expectation is that by the end of 2008, the top major operators [in the US]… will be in some form of deployment stage for channel bonding in most parts of their network.”
On the need for both greater overall upstream capacity and peak upstream bandwidth capacity
“The reality is that when operators really want to begin to deploy full-scale, widely-available, production-ready upstream channel bonding they’re going to need two things: they’re going to need to increase the capacity of the number of upstreams for fiber node or neighborhood, and then number two, they’re naturally going to need the DOCSIS 3.0 upstream channel bonding solution.
So in Motorola’s case, we’re working on the upstream portion of our decoupled I-CMTS solution called the RX32 that will provide 32 upstream channels per single card as well as upstream channel bonding, and it’s the two of these that we believe will give the operator the optimum mix of increased average capacity as well as increased peak bandwidth for channel bonding.”
On making more downstream channels available for DOCSIS delivery, and specifically video on the Web:
“There’s a few operators that have implemented a one gigahertz extension beyond the typical 860 [megahertz] plant extension, and I’ve talked to many operators that are going to put DOCSIS 3.0 channels above the 860 megahertz range to get more downstream capacity. And I think there are other strategies being done by the video teams to relieve the amount of downstreams they need. And I think number one it’s analog reclamation. I think it’s switched digital [video] as another case.
But you know the other thing is, as a migration to IP video over DOCSIS happens… and as analog reclamation kicks in for various reasons, I think you’re going to see the video teams free up channels that will be provided to the DOCSIS teams or data teams that they will use for greater high-speed data, voice and IP video solutions, and especially when we talk about IP video in the future, you’re going to need a high number of DOCSIS channels to transport… many video channels to subscribers as that migration from an MPEG-based video to an IPTV-based video solution occurs.”
