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Nokia offers up 10 Gbps HFC demo

'CAMELOT!' … 'It's only a model'

Nokia Networks has applied the paddles to the chest of cable broadband, pumped in the volts, and sent it sprinting at 10 Gbps.

While the company says the proof-of-concept work demonstrates the viability of CableLabs' DOCSIS 3.1 roadmap, it's not yet working directly with the group.

The company showed off a demo of its XG-Cable technology at Boston's Internet & Television Expo. It managed to squeeze 1.2 GHz of analogue bandwidth out of the user-side coaxial copper, enough to run 10 Gbps symmetrical transmissions.

The demo showed off two scenarios: a single point-to-point run over a coaxial drop cable (the 10 Gbps transmission), and 7.5 Gbps in the more familiar point-to-multipoint HFC drop cable deployment.

In the its canned statement, the company says Nokia Bell Labs (then, of course, part of Alcatel-Lucent) started work on XG-Cable in 2014. Its aim is to get the technology to work on cable runs of 200 metres.

The technology is outlined in this Nokia white paper (PDF).

The paper explains that the biggest source of interference in a real-world deployment would be other customers' cable modems, so XG-Cable manages the time slots it allocates to modems in a management group so they're not transmitting at the same time.

There's still a lot of work needed to turn XG-Cable into something operators can deploy: going from the lab to a standard to a product takes time.

More importantly, the cable plant already in the field would need a bit of work.

The splitters and taps that dole out analogue bandwidth would have to be replaced for full-duplex operation; and existing line amplifiers, which don't support 1.2 GHz symmetrical analogue bandwidth, would also need to be upgraded. ®

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