Comcast is kicking off a trial of low-latency DOCSIS (LLD) today. The technology is designed to enable content providers or app developers desiring low-latency connectivity to mark traffic as latency-sensitive in order to improve performance.
As Comcast Vice President Jason Livingood explained in a blog post, LLD is a Cablelabs standard that uses low-latency flows that share “the same bandwidth and best-efforts prioritization as regular traffic and doesn’t adversely impact the quality, speed or latency of unmarked traffic.”
When Telecompetitor followed up to ask how this is achieved, Livingood replied that the low-latency flow “shares the same bandwidth and priority of regular traffic – so no one is worse off. But if an app developer marks their flow as latency sensitive then it gets dramatically lower latency by using this new low latency queue.”
During the Comcast trial, content providers will be able to mark their traffic as latency-sensitive using “openly documented technical guidelines.” Comcast Xfinity customers who live in trial markets and lease the latest Xfinity 10G Gateway (XB7 and XB8 models) or who own an Arris S33 or Netgear CM1000v2 gateway can participate in the trial.
Livingood’s low-latency DOCSIS blog post contains links to the technical guidelines that content providers would need to follow to mark their traffic as latency-sensitive.
The blog post also explains how those interested in participating in the trial should contact Comcast about that.
