Networking

Japanese telecom giant KDDI said on Friday it has deployed the world’s first commercial 5G standalone open radio access network (Open RAN) in Japan.

The network, now available in the city of Kawasaki at Kanagawa Prefecture, is powered by Samsung’s virtualised central units and virtualised distributed units as well as Fujitsu’s massive MIMO radio units. Samsung’s baseband and Fujitsu’s massive MIMO radio units are connected with an open interface, the telecom giant said. The site at Kawaski also has network slicing and multi-access edge computing capabilities, which will offer higher speeds and lower latency for mobile users, the company said. KDDI said the use of virtualisation and Open RAN technologies, which use software that can operate on commercial off-the-shelf servers to replace previously hardware elements, will bring flexibility and agility to its network with deployment being more cost-effective. The launch of the network will also allow the company to accelerate deployment of Open RAN across Japan, including in rural areas, which it will continue to do with Samsung and Fujitsu throughout 2022, the teleco said. Prior to Samsung becoming the 5G network equipment supplier for KDDI, the pair had already been collaborating on related technologies since 2017. Last year, the South Korean tech giant also announced it was supplying its 5G kit to NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest telco.

Samsung, a vocal supporter of vRAN and Open RAN technologies, has also provided its vRAN solutions in the US and the UK for Open RAN rollouts there. Related Coverage More

Networking giant Cisco Systems announced its FY22 Q2 numbers on Wednesday. ZDNet summarized the results in this post, so I won’t go into detail on the numbers. At a high level, the company put up a modest beat, which is impressive given the unprecedented supply-chain constraints that are playing havoc with infrastructure vendors.

Quarterly revenue and non-GAAP EPS were $56 million and $0.03 ahead of street expectations respectively. The $12.7 billion in revenue represents 6.4% year-over-year growth, which is impressive for a $50 billion annual-run-rate company. While the financials give the industry a sense that demand for Cisco is strong, it’s worth looking behind the numbers to get a better picture of where Cisco’s business is and where it’s going.  Demand for company’s products never stronger The numbers show 6.5% year-over-year growth, but that was tempered by the macro supply chain issues. Total product order growth for the quarter was up 33% YoY, making it the third consecutive quarter this metric has topped 30%. Looking at segments, enterprise orders grew 37%, its strongest number in a dozen years. Service providers and webscale grew 42% and 70%, respectively. These are notable because Cisco has struggled in these segments historically, but that ship seems to have turned on the strength of a refreshed ASR 9K and Catalyst 8K portfolios. These include the acquisition of Acacia. Commercial business (SMB) jumped 34% and public sector 22%. This order growth has resulted in an RPO growing (remaining performance obligation) 8.5% to $30.5 billion, with 53% to be recognized in the next 12 months. Also, Cisco reported its backlog is now over $14 billion, which oddly enough includes $2 billion in software backlog, which is unusual but occurs due to the tie to hardware. CEO Chuck Robbins addressed the backlog on the earnings call and noted that supply issues have not gotten worse but also have not improved. The shift to subscription and inventory backlog has put Cisco in a comfortable, predictable position with demand not seen in more than a decade. AA A massive software company Under Robbins, Cisco has been aggressive in its transition to subscription software. This wasn’t an easy thing to do for a company whose value is mostly tied up in hardware. Total software revenue is now $3.8 billion, 80% of which comes via subscription. That number annualizes to more than $15 billion in software, making it a top-5 software company. While many Cisco products are still delivered as hardware, much of the value is now through software. This is an important pivot because it enables the company to innovate new features its customers can use, faster than with a hardware-only model.

Consider how Teslas, iPhones, and other consumer devices are hardware devices that deliver value through software updates. All of Cisco’s newer hardware products work this way. Customers buy the hardware but also purchase a software subscription. This ensures they can run the latest and greatest features without going through a costly hardware upgrade. The network is not a commodity 

Many industry watchers have been calling for the network to be commoditized for the better part of two decades. The bearish outlook on Cisco was that network features were largely becoming standardized, leaving no room for differentiation and causing the bottom to fall out of the industry. Huawei was going to do this to Cisco, the same way software-defined networking was going to do it to white boxes. These trends have come and gone, yet Cisco’s gross margins remain in the mid-60% range, where it has historically been. In technology, it’s always been my belief that no market is a commodity if the vendor can create differentiation. People pay thousands for a MacBook even though Chromebooks are just a few hundred dollars. VMware maintains healthy margins for virtualization despite a strong push from Microsoft. Cisco’s differentiation in networking has been and continues to be driven via its custom silicon. Most network vendors use merchant silicon from vendors such as Broadcom, but Cisco has largely eschewed that model. It has built its hardware, allowing it to often get a first-mover advantage with new features and performance numbers. From an enterprise perspective, the shift to hybrid work has shone a new light on the network, which rarely earned any C-level attention previously. In a recent ZK Research study, a little over 60% of business leaders stated that the network has grown in business value since the pandemic began. Most enabling technologies for digital initiatives, such as cloud, mobile, and IoT are network-centric, making the choice of network vendor a critical one for businesses. With that being said, the competitive landscape in this area is much tougher for Cisco. Arista, HPE, VMware, Juniper, and Extreme Networks are all strong companies. Also, AWS, GCP, and Azure eyeing network services and 5G could shift things to telcos, so it will be interesting to see if Cisco can continue to stay at the front of the innovation train. Security, collaboration in transition While the network business remains robust at Cisco, its security and collaboration businesses are currently in the midst of transitions. Security showed growth of 7%, which is well behind the growth of companies like Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Zscaler. However, Cisco’s security growth number is a mix of declining on-premises hardware and cloud-delivered security centered in its Duo product. Over time, the hardware business will level out and security growth should jump back up to the teens, but right now the legacy products are acting as a drag on the business.Similarly, Cisco’s collaboration products experienced a decline of 9%. I know the core Webex business is growing, but Cisco has a huge base of customers still using on-premises VoIP, Jabber, and Telepresence. Also, many of Cisco’s newer collaboration endpoints were bitten by supply chain issues, limiting availability. Again, over time I expect to see Cisco migrate customers over to Webex and, as this happens, collaboration should return to growth.

Tech Earnings More

Cisco on Wednesday published better-than-expected second quarter financial results, reporting strong product order growth as well as a major product order backlog. All told, Cisco’s Q2 non-GAAP earnings per share came to 84 cents on revenue of $12.7 billion, up 6% year over year.Wall Street was expecting second-quarter earnings of 81 cents per share on revenue of $12.65 billion.

Networking

“We continue to see incredibly strong demand across our portfolio, emphasizing the criticality and relevance of Cisco’s innovation,” CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. “Our robust order strength, record backlog and double-digit growth in annual recurring revenue position us well to deliver growth.” Total product order growth in Q2 was up 33% year-over-year, making it the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year product order growth of 30% or higher. Enterprise orders growth accelerated to 37%, and webscale orders grew over 70%.However, Cisco had an all-time high product backlog of $14 billion, increasing more than 150% year-over-year. Within that amount, the software backlog almost doubled to more than $2 billion. “Our incredibly strong demand continues to outpace supply, expanding our backlog of products, software and services,” CEO Chuck Robbins said in on a conference call Wednesday. “Our supply chain team continues to take aggressive action through strong inventory positions, deepening supplier relationships, qualifying alternative components and increased used of expedited freight. There are still significant constraints with semiconductors preventing us from completing manufacturing of some of our products, and that remains a headwind to revenue growth despite very strong demand.”

Product revenue was up 9%. Product revenue performance was led by growth in Secure, Agile Networks up 7%, Internet for the Future up 42%, End-to-End Security up 7%, and Optimized Application Experiences up 12%. Hybrid Work was down 9%.Reflecting Cisco’s transformation to a software and subscription-based business, total Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR) came to $21.9 billion in the second quarter, up 11% year-over-year. Software revenue grew to $3.8 billion, and 80% of software revenue was subscription-based, up 4 percentage points year-over-year. Total subscription revenue grew to $5.5 billion, representing 44% of total revenue.For the third quarter, Cisco expects revenue growth of 3% to 5% year-over-year and an EPS between 85 cents and 87 cents. The market is expecting an EPS of 86 cents. For the full FY 2022, the company expects revenue growth of 5.5% to 6.5% and an EPS of $3.41 to $3.46.

Tech Earnings More

Soon both Google Chrome, the most popular of all web browsers, and the Firefox web browser will release their 100th version. Now, besides just being a cool number, there are technical issues that come with these anniversary releases. Some of those issues may cause your websites to fail. Yes, fail. Here’s why.

ZDNet Recommends

All web browsers come with a User-Agent (UA). This is a string that browsers send in HTTP headers, so servers can identify the browser.  JavaScript also uses it with the JavaScript navigator.userAgent. Web developers use the UA in all kinds of ways with their server-side programs. The UA’s format is: browserName/majorVersion.minorVersionAs this written typical examples of the latest release versions of browsers UAs are:Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.54 Safari/537.36Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:96.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/96.0So, what’s the problem here? It’s an ancient one: Date format misconfigurations. The most famous example is the still not quite dead yet Y2K problem. Then, the problem was that most programs of the late 90s and earlier couldn’t deal with four-figure year dates. This time around our problem is that too many website programs can’t deal with three-figure UAs. Yes, it’s that simple.But, while it may be simple, it doesn’t mean that it’s inconsequential. You see, we’ve already had a sneak preview of this problem when we went from 1-figure UAs (1-9) to 10-figure UAs. For instance, Opera 10 wouldn’t render sites correctly back in 2009 and some sites wouldn’t render at all with Firefox 10 because their scripts read Firefox 10 as the out-of-date Firefox 1.0. We can expect all this and more as Chrome and Firefox 100 arrive.

Google and Mozilla are well aware of these coming browser UA problems. Both are working on finding and fixing the headaches.Some of these problems will escape their efforts. For example, while it’s been known for decades that using UAs to determine what web pages or services should be served to a specific browser is a bad idea, that’s never stopped all too many web developers from misusing them anyway. If your website does this, odds are good your site will end up sending an error message instead of web pages to a version 100 web browsers.You can check today if your site has such a problem using a Chrome feature flag, which forces Chrome to send a three-digit UA. Then, you can check to see if the new UA is being presented properly by visiting the test site, Is Chrome 100 Yet? Then you can use this browser to check out your own sites for problems. Firefox is also offering similar tests.With either browser, if you find something breaks because of the UA before fixing it, file a report on Webcompat. Also, be sure to check that you haven’t uncovered another kind of bug by checking to see if the problem still pops up when you’re using the normal UA.In cases things go more badly than either Chrome or Firefox’s engineering teams expect, both have mitigation plans in place. In Firefox, there’s a site intervention mechanism. With this, the Mozilla webcompat team can hot-fix broken websites. To see what’s being fixed you can type about:compat in the URL bar. And, of course, if a site breaks because it can’t handle the major version being 100, a user can fix it by sending version 99 instead. But, it’s much too much to ask for ordinary users to manually change their UAs. If things go completely haywire and there are widespread site failures, Mozilla plans to temporarily freeze Firefox’s major version at 99 and test other approaches.With Chrome, the backup plan is to use a flag to freeze the major version at 99 and report the real major version number in the minor version part of the UA string. This fall-back code is already available in Chrome’s upstream open-source Chromium browser. In this case the Chrome version UA string will use the following  pattern …. So, for example, the important part might look like 99.101.4988.0. Google’s Chrome developers will decide on whether to resort to this backup option if things go badly wrong. If you want to help make this problem a non-issue–the reason why people thought Y2K wasn’t that big a deal was because of all the efforts made beforehand to make sure it was properly fixed–both Google and Mozilla would welcome your help. And, of course, your own company would appreciate making sure its website doesn’t go up in smoke when the version 100 editions are released.You can do this by setting up your early release browser to report the version as 100 and report any issues you come across. Here’s how to do this. Configure Firefox Nightly to report the major version as 100Open Firefox Nightly’s Settings menu.Search for “Firefox 100” and then check the “Firefox 100 User-Agent String” option.Configure Chrome to report the major version as 100Go to chrome://flags/#force-major-version-to-100Set the option to `Enabled`.Before starting, keep in mind several UA string failures have already been found. If you’re a web developer using an old UA parsing library, you should test to make sure it can deal with UA versions greater than or equal to 100. Early tests show that most recent libraries will do fine. But, as we all know, the web is filled with old code. So it’s all too possible that you’re using an old, incompatible parsing library, and not even know about it until they hiccup on the latest browsers leaving your users wondering what the heck just happened.It’s time to get to work. Chrome 100 is expected to be released in March 2022 and Firefox 100 is scheduled for release on May 3. 2022. Before then, you’ll want to make sure your websites work the way you expect them to come the day,Related Stories: More

Networking technology pioneer Arista Networks this afternoon reported Q4 revenue and profit that both topped Wall Street’s expectations, and an outlook for this quarter’s revenue that was higher as well. The report sent Arista shares up 8% in late trading. Despite the upbeat report and forecast, CEO Jayshree Ullal told analysts during the company’s conference call Monday evening that disruption of the global supply chain that is affecting its sales of network switches will continue into 2023. “And so despite the supply chain obstacles that we now expect to continue into 2023, we have emerged stronger,” Ullal told analysts. Some progress with suppliers in November yielded to further supply disruption as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 emerged, she said.  Supply chain, we felt, improved in November when we met with you all at the Analyst Day, but declined in January, when we started seeing some de-commits from some of our component vendors. So, I would describe our supply chain shortages as 2 steps forward and 1 step backward. We don’t like the 1 step backward, but between the Omicron virus, the labor shortages, the logistics and the component shortages, we’re certainly experiencing another wave of uncertainty in Q1 over here. Q1 isn’t the great indicator of supply chain improving.In the company’s press release, Ullal said in prepared remarks, “I am delighted with Arista’s record 2021 milestones in innovation, diversified customer momentum and earnings. “We have executed well to establish Arista among the fastest growing networking companies in this decade.”

Said CFO Ita Brennan, “The Arista team has shown great resilience and flexibility throughout 2021, maintaining operational excellence in the face of industry-wide challenges and delivering our first billion-dollar cash flow year.”Revenue in the three months ended in December rose to $824.5 million, yielding a net profit of 82 cents a share, excluding some costs.Analysts had been modeling $790 million and 73 cents per share.The company’s gross profit margin, on a non-GAAP basis, was 64.3%, down from 65% a year earlier and 64.9% in the prior quarter. Cash from operations in the year rose to $1.015 billion, while capital investment was $64.7 million, leaving free cash flow of $950 million.For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $840 million to $860 million, above consensus of $831.6 million.Arista expects gross profit in a range of 63% to 64%, it said.

Tech Earnings More

The Nighthawk M5 measures 105mm (4.14in.) square and is 21.5mm (0.85in.) thick. It has a 2.4-inch LCD touch screen, a power button, a USB-C port and an RJ-45 Ethernet port. There are also two TS-9 connectors for use with external 5G/4G/3G antennas.
Images: Netgear
MiFi-style wireless routers have fallen out of fashion, thanks to smartphones with good data plans and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi. But there’s still a place for portable cellular connectivity, especially in a world of hybrid work where the option of being online anywhere has great value. Netgear’s Nighthawk M5 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Router is an attempt to update the MiFi form factor for modern demands.  The Netgear Nighthawk M5 (MR5200) costs £779.99 (inc. VAT; £649.99 ex. VAT) in the UK, or $699.99 in the US.  A simple black box with an LCD touch screen on the top, the Nighthawk M5 has two ports: RJ-45 Ethernet and a dual-purpose USB-C connector for tethering laptops and powering the router. Inside there’s a slot for a 5040mAh battery and a Micro-SIM card. The bottom pops off easily, allowing you to remove the battery and swap out SIMs as needed. The Nighthawk M5 also has two TS-9 antenna connectors for working with external MIMO antenna to increase range.  Under the hood is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X55 chipset. This is a standalone set of 5G hardware, with both modem and RF components. It’s one of the better 5G customer premises chipsets, supporting MIMO antennae and capable of using all the bandwidth in a 5G signal for impressive download speeds. Wi-Fi performance is good, with Wi-Fi 6 (dual-band 2.4/5GHz 802.11ax) support for up to 1.8Gbps. We were able to get speeds of over 200Mbps in a busy London suburb in a home with relatively poor indoor 5G performance. 

LikeEasy to set up and useHigh-performance portable 5G modem/router

Don’t LikeExpensiveToo many administration tools

Going online Getting started is simple enough. Put in a SIM, make sure the battery is charged and turn on the router. You’ll be prompted to set up a network SSID and password, as well as adding an admin password for the device’s web-based admin tool. Usefully all this is handled on the device, using the touch screen and an on-display keyboard. We did find you needed to make a relatively firm press on the keys, so take your time if you don’t want to have to reset the device after an inadvertent typo!  The router will then connect to your cellular provider, displaying the signal strength and how much data has been used. The display serves as a reminder of your wireless network, showing the number of connected devices and giving access to quick on-device settings.  While the on-device quick start is enough to get you started, not everything can be managed from the device’s screen — it’s for relatively simple tasks like setting SSID and passwords, as well as managing tethering. More complex tasks, like managing the build DHCP server and changing device IP ranges, need the web-based admin tool or the Netgear Mobile app, which is available for both Android and iOS. 

This is perhaps the Nighthawk M5’s biggest drawback: it’s hard to remember which admin tool you need to complete which task. It’s fair enough to have a limited UI on a small LCD screen, but when your mobile admin app forces you to use the web for complex tasks it’s clear that there are too many tools.  Netgear Nighthawk M5 (MR5200) specifications    5G NR bands n1, n3, n5, n7, n8, n20, n28, n38, n40, n77 and n78  4G LTE bands 700/800/900/1800/2100/2600MHz (FDD), 2300/2600MHz (TDD)    3G bands 850/900/1900/2100MHz   Chipset Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G modem   Wi-Fi   Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax); AX1800 max throughput (1.2Gbps on 5GHz, 600Mbps on 2.4GHz)   Number of devices supported over Wi-Fi Up to 32   Dimensions 105mm x 105mm x 21.5mm (4.14in. x 4.14in. x 0.85in.)   Weight 240g (0.54lbs) with battery   Display 2.4-inch LCD touch screen   Battery 5040mAh   Battery life Up to 13 hours on a single charge   Smartphone app   Netgear Mobile (Android, iOS)   Price$699.99, £779.99 (inc. VAT; £649.99 ex. VAT) Save battery life One of the Nighthawk M5’s more interesting features is its support for battery-free operation. Keeping a battery on charge can significantly reduce its life, so if you’re using the M5 as a 5G wireless broadband access point for a wired network, you can simply pop out the battery and restart. The router will run off its USB-C power supply while it provides Wi-Fi and wired connectivity.  While the device will warn you that the battery isn’t installed, the warning is quickly dismissed. Removing the battery when you’re working in one place for a long time and have access to power makes sense, especially when you’re considerably reducing the risk of catastrophic battery failure.  With the battery removed, the Nighthawk M5 behaves much like any other Wi-Fi access point, with some additional features that make it a useful option for small offices and for edge computing. While you can use it to quickly provide Wi-Fi anywhere there’s a 4G or 5G signal, there’s also the interesting option of using it in what Netgear calls ‘Always-on Wi-Fi’ mode. Here you’re using the device as a standard Ethernet-connected wireless router. However, if it detects loss of internet connectivity, it’ll automatically switch to its 5G modem.  Not only a portable router Other options include support for data offloading, where the router works with an external Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection to reduce load on your cellular data connection. This approach has the added advantage of letting you use the Nighthawk M5 as a travel router, sharing one Wi-Fi connection between multiple devices. Just make sure you’re using a separate IP address range from the host Wi-Fi network.  A 5G Wi-Fi network to go, or 5G failover for your home/office network.
Image: Netgear
I’ve been using the Nighthawk M5 for failover connectivity in a small/home office network, connecting it to the Ethernet WAN port on a Draytek broadband router. It’s installed near the router, close to the main windows. While performance is good, it is limited by being indoors. There’s the option of using an external MIMO 5G antenna, connected to its TS-9 ports, which can be mounted outside the house.  It’s important to note that this isn’t a budget device. Like much of the Nighthawk family, the M5 carries a premium price. However, you do get premium performance to go with it. Paired with an unlimited data plan it’s a good alternative to fixed-line broadband, with the added option of being portable. Slip it in a pocket or travel bag and your laptop will have excellent connectivity — as long as you’re in a 5G area.  RECENT AND RELATED CONTENT  5G arrives: Understanding what it means for you Smart home: Six tech upgrades to make your house even smarter The best 5G home internet: Your broadband options Best hotspot: Work securely anywhere Read more reviews More

Telecom provider NTT has connected with cloud-based workflow automation platform ServiceNow to speed up the adoption of private 5G (P5G) in the enterprise. The combined NTT/ServiceNow solution is designed to give organizations a personalized, verticalized, automated approach to P5G deployments. 

The solution builds upon NTT’s P5G network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, launched in August 2021 and leveraging technology from Celona Networks. NTT’s P5G technology can be deployed via cloud, on-premises, or at the edge as a subscription-based service, which allows organizations to build highly agile enterprise networks. P5G also gives organizations more control because they can manage their own security and network functions versus using a carrier-based 5G solution. ServiceNow brings vertical workflows to private 5G This is a natural fit. ServiceNow has pre-built workflows designed for the needs of specific industries, which have been integrated with NTT’s P5G network capabilities to create a single bundled service. By having workflows integrated into the private network itself, organizations can facilitate deployment much faster. Whereas, deploying networks without integrated business processes typically doesn’t give organizations the outcome they want. Historically, operational teams often deploy networks without any thought to the business processes it supports. This limits the value to connectivity and doesn’t always solve real business problems. Organizations are not relying on network centric technologies such as cloud, IoT, and mobility, and the network can no longer be an afterthought. When the workflow is integrated into the network, it yields better business outcomes. Companies are now tasked with digitizing new and existing business processes to bridge the gap between their workflows and P5G networks. However, automating operational service workflows can be challenging. That’s why ServiceNow developed artificial intelligence-enabled workflow orchestration capabilities to bring people, processes, and systems together. AI automates problem resolution Now network teams don’t have to spend time and resources coming up with ways to integrate networks with back office systems. Once the ServiceNow AI engine identifies a problem, it can be translated into a workflow and automated. For example, manufacturing organizations need to export massive amounts of data off the factory floor, which isn’t a trivial task, given the number of systems deployed. NTT and ServiceNow have done much of the heavy lifting with clients to understand the challenges and used AI to build the logic to drive better outcomes. Its machine efficiency index measures the quality of parts being produced, rate of production, hours spent, and other metrics that can impact overall production. Once the AI engine has identified the problem, a workflow can be created to assign the job to a technician, auditor, or another individual. This means IT no longer has to manually integrate network data with the back-office systems. Cost allocation simplified 

Another challenge being addressed is billing for deployed networks, where the cost of 5G and Wi-Fi has to be settled by different departments within organizations. NTT and ServiceNow are enabling basic features such as cost allocation to help organizations move beyond the pilot stage toward fully operational P5G networks. Approximately half of organizations worldwide plan to deploy a P5G network within the next six to 24 months. Nearly a quarter are piloting private 5G networks, while a few have at least one operational P5G network, according to a study recently published by Economist Impact and NTT. Most IT decision-makers view private 5G as a substitute for Wi-Fi because security and data protection can be customized. Particularly, industries that rely on warehouses, factories, and distribution centers believe P5G is more economical than Wi-Fi since it requires deploying only a few access points versus hundreds of Wi-Fi access points. The fact that ServiceNow has various modules for industries, billing, and operations is a key differentiator.Specific industries can have plugins for modules that incorporate 5G into their manufacturing workflow, for instance. ServiceNow and NTT bring these capabilities together in a ready-to-use kit. This is not something telcos or equipment-only vendors can offer at the moment. More

When I started using the internet, I was glad to have a 300-baud modem hook-up. A serious business connection was a T-1, which could reach an amazing 1.54 Megabit per second (Mbps) of throughput. Things have changed. Now, I have a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) internet link to my home office — and someday soon, CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and development lab, promises that we’ll have 10 Gbps (10G) access for homes and offices.

ZDNet Recommends

The first steps have already been made. In 2021, Comcast and Broadcom showed that with full-duplex (FDX) DOCSIS 4 system-on-chip (SoC) devices, the partners could hit 4Gbps. This was done using DOCSIS 4’s echo cancellation and overlapping spectrum techniques. Comcast also completed a successful test of a complete 10G connection using a DOCSIS 4-based virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). DOCSIS 4, the next generation of cable internet, combines existing cable and fiber broadband over cable’s hybrid fiber coax (HFC). This new technology supports up to 10 Gbps speeds downstream and up to 6 Gbps upstream.We’re already achieving that speed in labs. Charter Communications, aka Spectrum, recently demonstrated greater than 8.5 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream on a hybrid HFC. This was done without laying any cable or fiber, but by using pre-existing HFC infrastructure. CableLabs member, Armstrong, took it one step further. The company launched a 10-gigabit fiber-optic network in Medina, Ohio to customers. This delivered 10G access to more than 3000 businesses and residences in the area. CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney proclaimed, “With faster symmetrical speeds, lower latency, enhanced reliability, and improved security, the emerging 10G network will truly power the next generation of innovation.” Here’s how:Improved Capacity It sounds simple-minded but we can reach 10G by simply increasing the number of bits per second delivered to subscribers. Of course, that’s easier said than done. 

To help operators better meet that demand CableLabs published specifications for a new device, called the Coherent Termination Device. This works by using the ISP’s existing fiber assets more efficiently by teaming up coherent optics technologies and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in the optical access network. This enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to pack more bits into their existing fiber network. The technologies are already known to work. Coherent optics is already used for long-haul internet backbone, metro, and undersea networks.Advancing 10G InnovationTo continue innovation momentum, CableLabs has launched the 10G Challenge to accelerate the work of innovators, startups, students, and entrepreneurs in developing 10G applications. With total prizes of over $300,000, the 10G Challenge is designed to inspire innovators to leverage the emerging 10G network. Six winners will be chosen, and the Grand Prize Winner and category winners will have the opportunity to present their technologies at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2022 trade show.McKinney concluded, “While we don’t know what the future holds, we do know that the internet will play a vital role in shaping it.” And, the 10G platform and its applications “create a better future for humanity.”Related Stories: More