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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @10:12PM
It's cheaper, though, and you have better security. I'm going to buy a high bandwidth home internet connection anyway, and I have a Linux desktop PC anyway. So I slap two extra hard drives into the PC and an extra 16GB of RAM, and now it runs my own instance of the open source Sandstorm software 24/7 (broadly similar to OwnCloud but arguably much better) while I can still play the occasional game, surf the web, watch movies, and so forth. Total cost is $300 for the two extra drives, SATA cables, and RAM and maybe $13 per month for the higher bandwidth connection. I can also run some Linux ISO torrents 24/7 (I don't pirate... not that I expect anyone to believe me) and maybe a node for Yacy or GNU Social or similar.
How much would I have to spend to get an equivalent server from some other server provider? And while law enforcement issues can get a warrant to seize my servers, it's unlikely to happen unless they have a good cause. Compare that to hosting at some colocation center, where overly broad warrants can allow an agency to sift through your data because someone else once shared torrents of Scary Movie 4 from the same virtualization host.