Tag Archives: docsis

Cisco moves to fend off Rockstar patent assault on its customers

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Time Warner, Charter, and other cable companies are being sued by Rockstar for using Cisco equipment, like modems and cable boxes that run on standards such as DOCSIS.

“Cisco and Nortel were working and selling products in the same market for decades,” points out Cisco’s outside lawyer on the case, John Desmarais. “They never bothered each other, never sued each other, never threatened each other with infringement. If Nortel really thought those patents were infringed by Cisco, you think something would have been brought up.”

via Cisco moves to fend off Rockstar patent assault on its customers | Ars Technica.

Docsis 3.1 Rides the Wireless Wave

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OFDM will provide Docsis with a new order of bandwidth efficiency, but it also offers some sound business reasons for cable to adopt it. OFDM, already used for Wi-Fi and Long Term Evolution (LTE), could lead to better economies of scale and get more vendors interested in the cable market, explained Daniel Howard, the SVP of engineer and CTO at Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), during a webcast earlier this month on the topic (SCTE is tasked with helping the cable industry get trained up for Docsis 3.1). (See Setting the Stage for Docsis 3.1.)

via Light Reading – Docsis 3.1 Rides the Wireless Wave.

Lots of interesting info on OFDM in this article.  I find it amazing how creative people get in squeezing not just more bandwidth, but orders of magnitude more bandwidth, using the same physical outside plant infrastructure.

Docsis 3.1 Targets 10-Gig Downstream

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ORLANDO — SCTE Cable-Tec Expo — The Docsis 3.1 platform will support capacities of at least 10Gbit/s downstream and 1Gbit/s upstream, a move that will certainly prolong the industry’s need to deploy fiber all the way to the home.

via Light Reading Cable – Cable – Docsis 3.1 Targets 10-Gig Downstream – Telecom News Analysis.

To hit its capacity targets, the cable industry wants to increase its spectral efficiency by about 50 percent. As expected, the new specs will do away with 6MHz- and 8MHz-wide channel spacing and instead use smaller (20KHz-to-50KHz-wide) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers; these can be bonded inside a block spectrum that could end up being about 200MHz wide. (See Docsis 3.1 Will Change Cable’s Data Channels.)

The definition of ofdm from wiki.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. OFDM has developed into a popular scheme for widebanddigital communication, whether wireless or over copper wires, used in applications such as digital television and audio broadcasting, DSLbroadband internet access, wireless networks, and 4G mobile communications.

And the primary advantage using ofdm is:

The primary advantage of OFDM over single-carrier schemes is its ability to cope with severe channel conditions (for example, attenuation of high frequencies in a long copper wire, narrowband interference and frequency-selective fading due to multipath) without complex equalization filters.  Channel equalization is simplified because OFDM may be viewed as using many slowly modulated narrowband signals rather than one rapidly modulated wideband signal.