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.

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!