Full Duplex DOCSIS®: Near Fiber Optic Capacity with Coax Cable

Some people think coax cable is past its prime and can’t keep up with fiber, but that’s not true. This past August at the CableLabs Summer Conference, Cisco unveiled a new silicon reference design for Full Duplex DOCSIS® technology which can deliver near fiber optic capacity over an existing cable plant infrastructure. And we’re not keeping this to ourselves, to drive the industry forward Cisco contributed its innovative silicon reference design to the cable industry at large.

The Value of Full Duplex DOCSIS Technology

With this technology integrated into your existing cable plant infrastructure, you can provide your business and residential customers with a service experience closer to fiber, thereby extending the life of your installed hybrid fiber coax (HFC) for decades – without upgrading to fiber.

Instead of spending capital today to replace your existing HFC plant with fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP), you can invest in new services such as faster Internet, faster uploads of 4K video, security and managed business services. Full Duplex DOCSIS also supports symmetrical (same speeds both upstream and downstream) cable Internet services and video using a simplified and potentially virtualized all-IP architecture.

The Cisco Commitment to Innovation

At Cisco, we’re committed to developing technology that enables the cable industry to do business smarter. Over the last two years, more than 20 Cisco engineers worked on the Full Duplex DOCSIS® technology project to validate a reference design for a digital echo canceler that maximizes the use of HFC capacity. With their combined efforts, the Cisco engineering team was able to define a multi-slice scalable echo canceler for the Full Duplex DOCSIS specification that seamlessly integrates with the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) architecture. This technology is scalable for a return path from 200 MHz (1.7 Gbps) to 1.2 GHz (10 Gbps).

First demonstrated at the CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, Colorado, this technology project is one of many that we have provided to the cable industry and Open Source communities, including FD.IO and OpenRPD, which were announced earlier this year

Find Out More at SCTE in Philadelphia

We invite you join us on Monday, September 26, 2016 for the workshop, Beyond DOCSIS 3.1: FDX and More. During the moderated panel discussion, John Chapman, Cisco Fellow and CTO, Cable Access Business, will explain how Full Duplex DOCSIS Technology can help cable operators evolve more rapidly to deploy virtualized, fiber-deep, and all-IP infrastructures, while delivering services that are competitive to all-fiber operators.