Facing a 5G Foe, Cable ISP Industry Unveils Plans for 10G

As wireless providers plan to roll out their 5G networks, cable ISPs are aiming to do similarly with 10-gigabit networks or 10G. Monday at CES, the cable industry said the first deployments could come as soon as late 2021. Participants include Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications.

A major driver of 10G is the competition the cable ISP industry faces from 5G and from government-built overbuilding, and pushes back against critics claiming the industry doesn't invest or innovate, Tom Larsen, Mediacom senior vice president-legal and public affairs, told us. "In the technology space, every two years you should be reinventing yourself, redeploying." He pointed to the DOCSIS 3.1 rollout Mediacom and some other ISPs have undertaken in recent years. CTIA and 5G Americas didn't comment immediately.

10G will be "a menu of technologies designed to turbo-charge current networks, allowing providers to evolve existing one gigabit platforms to 10 gigabit connections with symmetrical speeds, lower latencies, enhanced reliability, higher compute capabilities, and better security in a scalable manner," NCTA CEO Michael Powell blogged. Underpinning it is a new standard, 10 Gigabit Full Duplex DOCSIS or 10g FDX, he said. He said Arris and Intel are supporting it.

An NCTA spokesperson said companies and CableLabs are doing 10G lab trials now, with field trials to start in 2020 and market deployment likely to begin 12 to 18 months after field trials are complete. He said the aim is both to complement and compete with wireless' 5G networks, with consumers benefiting from robust wireless and wireline high-speed networks. The vast majority of cable ISP networks already are 1 GB speeds, but history has shown consumers always want higher speeds, so 10G network demand should be strong, he said, saying the network also will enable new services. At Mediacom, where almost all its network has had 1 GB speeds since 2017, demand for such super-fast speeds has been higher than expected, and 10G should follow a similar route -- not wanted by every subscriber, but a significant percentage of them, Larsen said.

Larsen said a major aspect of 10G is its symmetrical speeds, which cable ISPs' fiber/coaxial hybrid networks are often criticized for lacking. He said 10G networks might require some capital work in the form of equipment upgrades and relocating nodes, but much of the deployment would be software enabled.

Arris said it has spent years "developing the building blocks that are the foundation for 10G ... providing the ability to ... evolve today’s networks to support multi-gig symmetrical services." It said early trials "have been very promising and [should] mature very quickly this year." Rogers Communications and Liberty Global are among non-U.S. ISPs on board.

The cable ISP industry said it will push regulators for policies that allow faster wireline deployment to enable 10G, same as it does now for companies' current network deployments. "The easier path they can make for us, the quicker those services will get deployed," Larsen said.