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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @07:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the quite-a-'bit'-faster dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @08:25PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @08:25PM (#583142)

    I expect it matches the majority of consumption habits for the vast majority of people.

    People who have been trained to be consumers instead of producers.

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by maxwell demon on Monday October 16 2017, @08:51PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday October 16 2017, @08:51PM (#583155) Journal

    Even most producers will have asymmetric bandwidth needs. For example, if you contribute to an Open Source/Free Software project. you're downloading a complete repository, but uploading only the changes that you wrote yourself.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday October 16 2017, @10:54PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 16 2017, @10:54PM (#583204) Journal

      For example, if you contribute to an Open Source/Free Software project. you're downloading a complete repository, but uploading only the changes that you wrote yourself.

      Really?
      What if you decide that you'd better keep the project hosted on your own home server, for whatever reasons (like not trusting the cloud, or be dissatisfied with the limited collab tools or the way the documentation is organized).
      Or adopt a peer-to-peer protocol to access a truly distributed repository - e.g. I can see a case for an open-source game, the 3D artifacts (models, textures, animations, etc) can go very quickly over the 1GB/repository quota allowed by github for free (as in beer) [github.com]

      The fact that most of the people don't need to serve [eff.org] doesn't preclude the existence of the right to serve [theregister.co.uk]**.
      IMHO this is one of the rights that 'net neutrality' should guard - a neutral internet imposes no restriction based on source/destination/protocol

      ---

      ** gosh, guys it has been only 4 years [crossies.com] since, you already forgot?

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 17 2017, @02:32AM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday October 17 2017, @02:32AM (#583274) Journal

    And notice how the consumers and producers are both being pushed on to clouds floating above walled gardens.