CED Magazine has a primer up on DOCSIS 3.0, a faster, more secure network standard the cable industry hopes will help them compete with incumbent phone providers. The high end of the standard will allow cable providers to offer 1 gig/100 meg per node, albeit shared to perhaps hundreds of homes. But it will be many years until the standard is fully deployed. Operators will utilize pre-3.0 channel bonding to meet fiber to the home competition (if the regional ILEC they compete with offers it in any volume, right Qwest?).

But the article touches on other options MSOs can attempt until DOCSIS 3.0 is solidified:

"For one, they can add a new QAM for a group of 500 homes sharing a 6 MHz channel, and split that to 250 homes on that channel. "Now you can do 10 Mbps with relatively small costs," says Gil Katz, director of cable solutions and strategy for Harmonic Inc. Another near-term option is to leverage (but not bond) an additional 6 MHz channel for high-speed data (HSD). In addition to increasing the capacity that can be shared by a given group of homes, another benefit is that operators will not have to introduce a new class of modem to support the strategy."

The piece predicts cable providers will begin shifting to DOCSIS 3.0 in 2008 or 2009. Full deployment will be slow indeed, with DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS use at 60% by 2011, and DOCSIS 3.0 CPEs (modems, set-tops, eMTAs, etc.) to be at only 40% by that same point.