Verizon Laughs Off DOCSIS 3.0Picks on the technology's shared nature, upstream limitations...
(
old news - 09:29AM Friday Jan 30 2009)
tags: prices · Fiber · competition · business · hardware · bandwidth · cable · networking · net-neutrality · Comcast · Verizon FIOS · Charter PipelineTipped by AVonGauss 
The recent
love letters to DOCSIS 3.0, and this week's announcement by Charter that they'd be offering
60Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 cable in St. Louis has apparently made Verizon grumpy. The telco yesterday took a shot at DOCSIS 3.0 over at their
policy blog. Verizon complains that comparisons between their FTTH FiOS service and DOCSIS 3.0 "ignore some key facts," namely that DOCSIS 3.0 architecture is shared, and that sometimes hundreds of customers reside on the same node. Says Verizon's Eric Rabe:
To fix this problem, cablecos face big capital costs to deploy more fiber to put nodes closer to customers. FiOS Internet doesn't have that problem. First, our downstream pipe is about 15 times the size of cable's: 2.4 Gigabits per second for FiOS;160 Megabits per second for DOCSIS using four channels. That FiOS capacity is shared by no more than 32 customers, compared to 125 to as many as 500 on some cable systems. Perhaps worse as new uses of the Internet develop, cable has limited upstream capacity. Already today Verizon FiOS delivers up to 20 Mbps upstream compared, for example, to Charter's reported top speed of 5 Mbps.
Of course, the "big capital costs" facing cable operators to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 are nothing compared to the cost Verizon has faced in replacing last mile copper with fiber optic cable. The relatively inexpensive costs of upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 are why many cable companies are taking their sweet time in getting it deployed. Rabe is right that Verizon's upstream capacity remains their most distinct advantage at the moment.
Verizon's also (so far)
not throttling, de-prioritizing or capping protocols or connections and have told me they have no immediate plans to do so. Verizon has also stated
they aren't participating in the RIAA's plans to boot heavy P2P users, meaning their engineers aren't particularly concerned with capacity strain. Of course to the average consumer, the choice between DOCSIS 3.0 and FiOS will ultimately come down to price.
