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Cable Labs Goes Full Duplex for DOCSIS 3.1 - but can ISPs and Modems Keep Up?
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 [theregister.co.uk]:
Which is why an announcement [cablelabs.com] 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 [theregister.co.uk] of home cable technology, and big players such as Comcast in the US are testing it in specific markets [theregister.co.uk] with a new generation of modems [theregister.co.uk]. 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 [theregister.co.uk] suffer from annoying latency jittering under certain conditions, and can be trivially knocked offline [theregister.co.uk] 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 [cablelabs.com] 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.
