For about a year now, NCTA has been shining a light on the DOCSIS 3.0 specification. Thanks to channel bonding, cable operators will be able to offer wideband service to consumers, with speeds exceeding 100 Mbps downstream. About a month ago, we noted the first deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 in the U.S.

A new article in CED Magazine (”DOCSIS 3.0 arrives“) takes a look at deployments by Videotron and Comcast.

After a year-long trial, [Canadian operator] Videotron is serving up two tiers of the wideband service with speeds of 30 Mbps and 50 Mbps. The slower “Ultimate Speed” costs $64.95 a month while the faster speed checks in at $79.95 a month.

Currently, Videotron’s Ultimate Speed services are available to 112,000 homes in Quebec, with the goal of offering the service to Videotron’s entire footprint of 933,000 homes by next year.

The article notes that, although Videotron didn’t need to do so, some operators may need to use Switched Digital Bandwidth to free up additional DOCSIS channels.

Comcast also picked a system where it wouldn’t need to clear room for more spectrum when it unveiled its first wideband deployment last month in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area with speeds of 50 Mbps on the downstream and 5 Mbps on the upstream.

The service is available to residential customers for $149.95 a month while small to medium-sized businesses can get the increased speeds for $199.95 a month.

Some operators are apparently planning on deployment in 2009.

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NCTA has been drawing attention to the DOCSIS 3.0 specification for almost a year now. You may have seen the video of Comcast’s Brian Roberts demonstrating wideband at The Cable Show in Las Vegas last year.

Big news this week as Comcast launched wideband service in the Twin Cities on Thursday. It’s a new extreme high-speed Internet residential and business service featuring up to 50 Mbps download and up to 5 Mbps upload speeds. Comcast will be launching to about 500,000 homes in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. In addition to the new hi-speed tier, Comcast is also increasing upload speeds for its residential Performance and Performance Plus service tiers for no additional charge. For example, the 6 Mbps/384 Kbps Performance tier will increase to 6 Mbps/1 Mbps and the 8 Mbps/768 Kbps Performance Plus tier will go up to 8 Mbps/2 Mbps

As I posted previously, Brian Roberts mentioned DOCSIS 3.0 rollout during his CES address a few months ago. Plans are to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to about 20% of Comcast’s markets by the end of the year.

There was coverage on Ars Technica, Engadget, Gizmodo, and the NY Times‘ Bits blog, but I was intrigued to see this post, which seemed to be from one of the first business customers to sign up for the service.

My experiences thus far have been amazing. When we first started to use it after the install, I broke into a huge grin as pages loaded instantly and I ran a 345MB update which hit my downloads folder and completed in what seemed like two minutes (it actually downloaded so quickly I forgot to watch it and time it). I’ve been achieving ~40mbps down and 3.4 to 4.1mbps upload speeds on average (which, of course, are dependent upon so many variables like internet traffic, server load and so on) so multi-use of our broadband connection has become more useful.

Nothing like first-hand reports.

Just to review a few fundamentals, DOCSIS stands for Data over Cable Service Interface Specifications. Cable operators right now use one 6 MHz channel slot to deliver high-speed data service. DOCSIS 3.0 describes a methodology for channel bonding, which allows you to combine 2, 3, 4 or more DOCSIS channels to increase the speed and throughput of the high-speed data service. The bonded channels do not have to be contiguous.

If you’re a cable customer, all you really care about is faster speeds. But the impact is broader, since DOCSIS 3.0 means better bandwidth utilization, improved video quality, enhanced security, better reporting to manage traffic, and enhanced tools to detect plant problems.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned cable’s own digital transition, and that shift of channels from analog to digital that frees up channels that can then be bonded to provide faster Internet access. In addition, it will allow cable operators to eventually provide video over DOCSIS services, also known as IPTV. For bandwidth efficiency, 3.0 allows operators to dedicate and isolate a video downstream to any and all users who want to watch it at the same time, in a simulation of the way linear TV works.

So, the full impact of of DOCSIS 3.0 is still to come.

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The performance by Flight of the Conchords at CES had not been available at Comcast’s CES website. They’ve rectified that and you can now catch Jemaine and Bret in action. Skip to about 12:10 left in the clip.

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Even though this is a gadget show, content’s role at CES increases with each successive year. Which makes sense, because most consumers ultimately don’t care about technology, they care about what they can accomplish with it.

If you shell out for a new HDTV, what you care about is being to watch compelling hi-def programming. That’s one reason that Comcast’s Brian Roberts talked about putting 1,000 HD “choices” in customers’ homes by the end of 2008 (some media outlets erroneously reported this as 1,000 channels) and about rolling out a new system architecture by the end of the year that will let Comcast make half of 6,000 monthly On Demand movie options available in high definition.

(By the way, this is especially important for you if you paid a lot for your TV.  The Cox Digital Straight Talk blog reports that Panasonic has sold more than 3,000 of the 103-inch plasma displays they showed at last year’s CES, at a price of $51,000 each.)

The same goes for your home computer. If you can watch video, whether streaming or downloaded, then you want as many available choices as possible. I often assume that if I can watch a show on TV, then there must be some way for me to watch that same show online, but that isn’t always true.

That topic came up at the CES panel “The True Cost of DRM: What Can’t We Do Now?,” as it had earlier, with some comparison of digital rights management as it has evolved for music, as opposed to the current state of DRM for video.

[Russell Frackman, Partner, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp] took issue with [American University’s Patricia] Aufderheide’s singling out of Viacom. “What about the other side of the equation? How much are YouTube and Google going to pay?” he asked.

“They built a filter Viacom didn’t pay for,” countered [Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred] von Lohmann.

That’s one way of looking at it: A streaming video service may not have paid for rights-controlled content, but the rightholder didn’t pay for the actions of tracking down their content and then taking it off the service.

The process of moving toward a future in which viewers can watch any piece of content ever made at any time on any device will be a slow, incremental process.  The amount of available content increases all the time and that’s a good thing for everybody.

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I’ve been to CES a few times over the last five years. On my first few trips, it did seem a little odd to notice cable’s absence. Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian Roberts described a very similar experience in his keynote this morning, talking about walking the show floor a few years ago with Time Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt. As Roberts put it, “Cable was almost invisible.”

Following that experience, the cable industry reached out to the consumer electronics industry. He said that they heard complaints that cable was a regional business that operated in silos, that cable set-top boxes are closed and proprietary, and that, in general, cable made it too tough to innovate and to create products and services that could be sold in the retail environment. This morning’s address seemed a valuable pay-off to those efforts, with Roberts describing cable as a real partner to consumer electronics and retail.

He went on to describe the latest stage of his company’s development: Comcast 3.0. As part of the new Comcast, he said they were committing to a series of issues:

• Having the best fiber optic networks and IP infrastructure
• Delivering superior experience in hi-def and interactive
• Providing new levels of excellence in customer service
• Being a leader in innovation by providing “products and services that are converged, plug-and-play, user-friendly, and most important, easily open for third-party innovation.”

Many in the cable industry have debated over whether content is king or distribution. Roberts said that today the answer is clear: The consumer is king. The best way to serve consumers is by offering a wide array of choice.

He went on to profile such new services as wideband, Fancast, Project Infinity, the AnyPlay portable DVR, and the SmartZone communications center. You can read about the details elsewhere, but the important feature was that Comcast was preparing to offer more video that could be consumed in a more flexible fashion, more bandwidth and more features on its communications services. In a word: more.

On May 8th of last year, during NCTA’s annual Cable Show (also held in Las Vegas), Roberts demoed a DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem capable of delivering 160 Mbps using its “channel bonding” technology. You can see a video of that demo here and, as a sign of how far we’ve come over the last decade, you can also see Roberts demo a high-speed cable modem in 1996. Look at how fast the photos download! Check out the White House website!

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Earlier this morning I attended the keynote address given by Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast. Paul did as well, and I suspect he’ll post himself, but it’s probably good to get two different perspectives. Engadget covered the proceedings as well.

Roberts began with a trip down memory lane. He told of a walk through the CES show floor he took with Glenn Britt, CEO of Time Warner. They were surprised to see the proliferation of devices that leverage cable’s platform, yet cable had virtually no presence at the event.

Cable, through CableLabs, began to reach out to the consumer electronics industry. As cable modems became available at retail, cable broadband took off.

Today we’re announcing the age of the closed proprietary set-top box is behind us.

Today Cable is employing a similar approach to TV and this week Panasonic and Comcast announced <tru2way>, the open standard for cable. This year <tru2way> will be rolled out to cable systems across the country and consumers will be able to purchase televisions with <tru2way> that plug directly into the cable network with no set-top box, no extra wires, and access to cable’s interactive services. <tru2way> offers an open platform for development with open APIs and a Java based system.

<tru2way> will be supported on MS Media Center PCs as well with all cable content, including program guide and OnDemand, accessible through the Media Center system.

AnyPlay

Roberts introduced Panasonic’s Toshihiro Sakamoto to introduce AnyPlay - a new set-top box with removable DVD and DVR capability. AnyPlay is a take and go device that connects to a docking station when working as the set-top box, but can be lifted out and taken as a portable media player for watching media at home or on the road. The device is about the size of a portable DVD player, but has DVR functionality embedded as well.

Roberts recognized his father, Richard Roberts who originally founded Comcast in 1963 as a 1,200 subscriber system in Tupelo Mississippi, offering 5 channels (twice as many as were available over the air).

The original premise then, as now, is “choice sells”.

Comcast began offering On Demand video services with 250 viewing choices. That increased to 1500 in a year. Now more than 10,000 viewing options are available every month. Comcast is now the largest provider of OnDemand in the world. 90% of their content is free. Customers using OnDemand have accounted for 6,000,000,000 views since launch - twice the number of iTunes downloads and six times more than NetFlix.

What’s more is OnDemand is only available to 15 of 25 million Comcast homes, but they have plans to roll out to everyone.

Beyond that, however, Comcast announced plans to provide 1,000 HD choices in every HD home by the end of 2008 (versus 150 for DirectTV). 2008 also begins rollout of a new system architecture, with 6000 movies on demand, 3000 in HD.

As they continue to grow Comcast is launching Project Infinity. Project Infinity is expected to scale well beyond 10,000 OnDemand options “to provide every piece of video content that a producer wants to put on TV – every movie, any TV show, any conceivable kind of video… it’s a content hungry consumers dream. You’ll never want to get off the couch.”

Comcast is also changing the communications experience. As the 4th largest phone company in America, Comcast serves more then 4 million customers. They’re rolling out new features like caller ID to the TV and integrated messaging on the web through a new feature called SmartZone.

SmartZone - introduced, via video, by Dennis Miller - integrated e-mail and voicemail in one inbox and integrates with another Comcast service called Fancast - a video and entertainment portal.

Ryan Seacrest joined Roberts on stage to introduce Fancast.

Fancast is not just another entertainment site. It’s a personal experience site with 3,000 hours of streaming videos, 10,000 movie trailers, and 11 million pages of entertainment. It provides personal recommendations based on your entertainment consumption (like Amazon). and it allows you to remotely control your DVR to record programs you’re looking at online.

Roberts used the discussion of Fancast to demonstrate cable’s new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem standard with speeds in excess of 160 Mbps planned for rollout this year. Seacrest and Roberts downloaded a 2 hour HD movie in 4 minutes during the presentation - a download that would have taken 6 hours via DSL and 7 days on dialup.

After a couple of questions from audience members, Roberts introduced HBO’s Flight of the Conchords for a performance.

The presentation was well received by the audience including much applause for the new Comcast services, wideband cable modems and <tru2way>. We’ll try to get video of the event and put it online for you.

Update: Comcast has the video (minus the performance by Flight of the Conchords) here. And you can get a copy of the prepared text here.

2nd Update: New version of the video available, which includes Flight of the Conchords.

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