Comcast says that it has achieved symmetrical 1.25 Gbps transmission on a live production network in Florida. The Comcast symmetrical 1.25 Gbps trial involves a home in Jacksonville.
The trial is running on a network built on Comcast’s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA). The network architecture features network functions virtualization (NFV) and the latest iteration of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) standard.
The speeds were reached by adding digital fiber optics, “Remote PHY” digital nodes and a cloud-based and virtualized cable modem termination system platform (vCMTS).
Comcast says that the test is a milestone in the journey to 10G and even faster speeds and that during the coming weeks it will expand the project to test performance in different home and network environments.
Being able to reach such speeds without extensive physical changes offers significant savings and quicker time to market with new services. “The great strength of our network technology is that we will have the ability to scale these next-generation speeds to tens of millions of homes in the future without digging up yards, or starting massive construction projects,” Tony Werner, the President of Technology, Product, Xperience for Comcast Cable said in a press release about the Comcast symmetrical 1.25 Gbps trial. “This technology provides a path to meeting the needs of the future and making multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds a reality for everyone, not just a select few.”
The cable industry has a long history of working in lock step through CableLabs. It is so in the case of 10G as well. In late September, the industry consortium released several specifications that will help support 10G. These include the flexible MAC architecture (FMA), the FMA MAC manager interface (MMI) and the FMA packetcable aggregator interface (PAI).
