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Tired of slow internet connections? CableLabs announces a new version of DOCSIS 3.1 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) with Full Duplex 10Gbps connectivity. From an article at The Register:
Which is why an announcement by the cable industry's research and development arm, CableLabs, this week is such good news. The organization has completed work on an upgrade to the next-generation DOCSIS 3.1 spec that in the next few years will replace the "M" in Mbps with a "G" for gigabit.
DOCSIS 3.1 is the cutting edge of home cable technology, and big players such as Comcast in the US are testing it in specific markets with a new generation of modems. That testing and rollout of near-gigabit broadband in the US, UK, Canada and beyond has been somewhat marred, though, by the fact that high-speed DOCSIS 3.1 home gateways powered by Intel Puma chips suffer from annoying latency jittering under certain conditions, and can be trivially knocked offline by attackers. No fixes are available.
Those hardware problems aside, the DOCSIS 3.1 spec has another issue: it sticks to the age-old sucky 10-to-1 downlink-uplink ratio.
No longer with the Full Duplex Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 will allow broadband subscribers – in the next two years – to benefit from up to 10Gbps both up and down. And it will be possible on existing household connections rather than requiring the installation of new fiber.
[...] You can find out more about Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 on the CableLabs website.
So, you could reach your monthly 1 TB data cap allowance in just under 3 hours, assuming, of course that the upstream link is not so oversubscribed that you only actually get a fraction of that.
All kidding aside, that is a huge speed improvement. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a 100GB BDXL Blu-ray disk could be downloaded in about 2 minutes. As the connection is full-duplex, it could be uploaded in about 2 minutes, too.
I can't even think of anything where that kind of speed would be useful in a home, except for making for speedier downloads of game/OS updates/installs and maybe for offsite backups.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Monday October 16 2017, @07:35PM
"I can't even think of anything where that kind of speed would be useful in a home, except for making for speedier downloads of game/OS updates/installs and maybe for offsite backups."
It gives ten people 100Mbps each.
People are always so blinkered by line speed that they forget everyone has smartphones, tablets, laptops, PC's, set-top-boxes, gadgets, etc. all connected at the same time.
The problem you have is that no ISP has that kind of backhail that they can give every customer the 1Gbps, let alone 10Gbps.
Think about it, 1,000,000 and you're pushing 10 petabits per second. With encryption, cloud services, etc. everything is becoming uncacheable too.
Sure, it'll come eventually, but it's going to cost an arm and a leg and it'll be used mainly to have a 10Gbps carrier with a 100Mbps stream inside it... for reliability, etc. nobody ever uses the maximum theoretical. They'll use it to have better, newer, modems and security features, etc. and they'll sit there for their lifetime doing 1/10th of what they're capable of, at best, unless you pay a huge premium. But when you do, they won't need to send you a new modem.