Making its first appearance at Cable-Tec Expo Show following its purchase of Arris earlier this year CommScope will present three technologies it believes will provide clarity for cable engineers to finally make some forward-looking decisions about their networks ... and start rendering some product orders.

Extended Soft Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) blends elements of Full Duplex DOCSIS and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, two technologies cooked up by CableLabs to extend the life of hybrid fiber coaxial networks into the next two decades. 

In fact, Chris Busch, CommScope engineering fellow in the office of the CTO, calls Extended Soft FDD “the union of the two technologies,” allowing operators to adjust allocation of bandwidth across the upstream and downstream channels.

Full Duplex DOCSIS has the capability of delivering symmetrical 10 Gbps speeds. But its uptake has been limited by what are perceived to be some inflexible factors.

“If we’re going to make Full Duplex work for us as industry, we need to have ability to use spectrum in many different use cases,” Busch said.

He added that unlike FDX, CommScope’s trials of Extended Soft FDD have revealed no rigid need for a node plus zero network configuration.

“A lot of Extended Soft FDD is amplifier friendly,” Busch said. “It’s a boon to the operator.”

CommScope will make its pitch next week amid a slow sales year for cable access technology vendors in general.

Also speaking to MCN Monday, Todd Kessler, senior VP of product management for CommScope, noted that the shift from centralized integrated CCAP architecture to Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) is one of the biggest technological changes the cable industry has ever made. He believes CTOs will continue to mull these decisions through the calendar year.

To hopefully move the market along, CommScope will also present what it calls DAA Aggregator, a product that lets operators connect up to eight HFC nodes to one Remote PHY device. This significantly increases the number of homes passed per RPD serving group—from 20 to 40 to between 150 to 300—enabling deeper reach into neighborhoods and a simplified path to network upgrades.

Also being demonstrated: DOCSIS Timing Protocol uses precise timing distribution over the DOCSIS networks for time-critical processing and applications, where a fraction of a second means the difference between success and failure. Current and future applications include mobile backhaul, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicle control.

“This is all built around driving the cable operators to better utilize their HFC plant, and breath new life into HFC architecture, taking fiber deeper, and adding to the technology,” Kessler said. 

When the cable industry launched its “10G” counter-marketing campaign at CES in January, the common interpretation was that the initiative revolved around Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), a CableLabs technology that is expected to eventually deliver 10 Gbps symmetrical broadband speeds.

As it turns out, the branding exercise—intended to counter the wireless industry’s aggressive promotion of next-generation 5G network technologies—is a bit broader than that.

Related: CES: Cable Declares It Won’t Be ‘Second to the Door’ to 5G With ‘10G’ Branding Launch

Speaking at an event produced and covered by Light Reading in Denver last week, CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney described 10G as a “collection of technologies,” including Full Duplex.

In a report issued last week, investment research company Cowen said 10G "is essentially a common platform that will involve a variety of technologies that CableLabs members can pick and choose from, in incremental steps, and that will begin trialing in 2020.

“Specifically, the 10G initiative involves various tools and features including low latency, improved security, a distributed access architecture (DAA, decentralizing the network, virtualizing the headend, and extending the digital/IP aspects of the network for speed/function enhancements), Full Duplex transmission (FDX, high speed in both directions), fiber deep, the N+0 architecture (no amplifiers needed between nodes and HHs), and subsequent meaningful opex/capex benefits,” Cowen added.

Notably, 10G’s collection fo broadband technologies will ultimately allow for speeds as high as 14.2 Gbps, with the “10G” sounding better for marketing. Cisco has noted that there will eventually be a pathway for 25 Gbps down and and 10 Gbps 10 up in the next 5 to 10 years.

Cowen believes that should be enough to ensure that the cable industry enjoys a broadband speed advantage over the next decade.

The research company concedes there is concern in the investment community that cable’s speed advance might be become “overkill,” with 5G stepping in over the next few years, sating a demand for some “killer app” in the home with modest speeds of 100 Gbps - 500 Gbps.

Tier 3 operator Midco, Cowen noted, recently conceded that only 3% of its broadband customers pay for 1-gig services. The research firm estimates that only around 8-10% of customers for Comcast and Charter have 1 Gbps.

Cowen cited Niesen’s Law, which states that consumer broadband demand will continue to increase at a rate of 50% a year. Some operators are being a compound annual growth rate of 35-45% for download speeds. Cowen predicted adoption of 4 Gbps speeds by the mid-2020s, and 10 Gbps speeds thereafter, which it believes will outpace what 5G can deliver.

The “killer apps” of this longer term future could be things like 3D holographic messaging, which would require speeds greater than 800 Gbps, and 360-immersive VR gaming and entertainment.

“We continue to believe the <6 GHz fixed wireless threat will be relegated to niche low-income/rural plays,” Cowen said. 

As cable operators around the world enter the finishing stages of DOCSIS 3.1 deployment, it’s still unclear as to how much current demand there is for 940 Mbps downstream services, the technology’s current speed threshold.

Read More: Cable-Tec Expo 2018

But as it has at each Cable-Tec Expo over the last several years, Arris is challenging the industry to see 1-gig downstream as just a signpost coming up fast. With internet of things putting more connected devices in the home, and applications like 4K streaming and virtual reality emerging, the vendor says cable operators are going to need to bring 20 Gbps into the home in the next 10 to 15 years.

While compounded annual growth rates (CAGR) of downstream traffic on the internet have stabilized a little of large, “upstream is actually accelerating, 25-30%, which is quite a bit higher than the 20% it used to be,” said Tom Cloonan, chief technical officer of Arris’ Networks Solutions unit, noting that the Suwanee, Georgia-based vendor is now focusing on technologies that improve upstream capacity and latency.

Related: Comcast testing FDX with MaxLinear, Other Vendors

In doing so, Arris is walking a bit of a marketing tight rope, as it tries to sell a more immediate network upgrade, Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), and a separate, theoretical one that is further out, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS.

As subscriber bandwidth demands grow and equipment capacities increase, MSOs will need to expand their upstream spectrum, and FDX provides a somewhat immediate opportunity to do just that, Cloonan said.

FDX enables DOCSIS 3.1 hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) networks to support shared 10 Gbps transmission capabilities in both the upstream and downstream directions. The current technology, DOCSIS 3.1, will support 10 Gbps downstream and only 1 Gbps upstream, once all of the standard’s features are finally actualized.

With CableLabs completing the specifications for FDX a year ago, Cloonan and his team will be using Cable-Tec Expo to show off network solutions based on the second generation E6000 Converged Cable Access Platform, with an eye for FDX upgrades occurring in the next two years.

Indeed, at the booths of multiple technology vendors, Full Duplex will be in the here and now this year, with operators including Comcast, for example, looking to swap in FDX-capable nodes as they transition to Distributed Access Architectures (DAA). And for its part, Arris has already been in the market touting the FDX upgrade potential of its DOCSIS 3.1 network solutions, such as one recently deployed by Australia’s NBN earlier this year.

To make FDX a reality, Cloonan explained, operators will need to be able to move quickly to a node+0 environment and be willing to upgrade their Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTSs), nodes and CPE.

Of course, that’s asking a lot for some cable companies.

Further out and currently in the research and development phase, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, Cloonan said, may be better suited for cable operators that want assurances that their future high-capacity networks will work in existing node+X environments that may not support FDX operation, which requires node+0.

“There are a lot of operators who have no intention of getting to a node+0 environment in next 10 years,” Cloonan said. “It’s going to take a while to run fiber deep enough to get to node+0.”

Capable of working in node+6 configurations, and delivering theoretical symmetrical speeds as high as 60 Gbps, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (aka “DOCSIS 4.0”) is being championed by operators including Cox Communications.

With Extended Spectrum DOCSIS, operators would use more—a lot more—than the 1.2 GHz of plant spectrum they currently exploit for DOCSIS 3.1. In fact, they’d use more than the 1.8 GHz leveraged by FDX. Extended Spectrum’s visionaries see as much as 3 Ghz, or even 6 GHz, being used.

It was Cloonan who first pitched the Extended Spectrum idea two years ago, with the technologists proposing the use of 6 GHz of spectrum and Fiber Deep to deliver symmetrical speeds as high as 50 Gbps.

Earlier this year, Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of advanced technology for Cox, told Lightreading that he had a team of Georgia Tech graduate students perform calculations suggesting the concept could actually work.

“A lot more work has to be put into it to prove it will work,” added Cloonan, who envisions a go-to-market for Extended Spectrum sometime in the mid-2020s range. “It’s not going to be put into the field next week.”

Of course, all of this work on advanced DOCSIS technologies is unfurling as Arris continues to support the current DOCSIS 3.1 standard.

“From Arris' point of view, we’re still developing 3.1 features,” Cloonan said. “The spec is several thousand pages long, and certainly, not every feature was turned on on day one. We’re still rolling features in. It’s still a very active program.”

DOCSIS 3.1 is already gunning for multi-gigabit speeds over HFC networks but a new project that will bring data symmetry to that platform and likely prolong the need to pull fiber all the way to the home, appears to be making swift progress.

Get complete coverage of Cable-Tec Expo 2016

CableLabs announced that project, called “Full Duplex” (FDX) DOCSIS, in February 2016, and it’s going to be a hot topic at this week’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Philadelphia.

RELATED: Cable-Tec Expo 2016: The Hot List

Rather than requiring a cable system to separate spectrum dedicated to the downstream and the upstream with a traditional “split,” FDX will enable “dual-use” bands for traffic that runs in both directions. FDX will also require an N+0, passive network, which fits in with the plans of some operators to pull fiber deeper and remove the active amplifiers present between the node and the home.

Following an initial feasibility/evaluation phase, the FDX project has since transitioned to the R&D and spec-writing phase. In August, CableLabs kicked off face-to-face meetings for the working groups and, if all goes to plan, is poised to become an extension to the DOCSIS 3.1 specs sometime in 2017, according to Belal Hamzeh, vice president of wireless technology at CableLabs.

FDX is an “evolution” of the current D3.1 specification, he said, noting that there will need to be some hardware modifications to existing gear. Whether that’s at the silicon or board level will be up to the specific implementations of the vendors.  

There’s an expectation that existing DOCSIS 3.0 bands will not overlap with the FDX band, but those implementations will vary from one operator to another and perhaps even within the same operator, Hamzeh said.

Tom Cloonan, chief technology of network solutions at Arris, said spectrum allocation for an eventual migration to FDX is still an active discussion among MSOs and vendors.

However, a possible deployment scenario could see an MSO set aside a band for the legacy DOCSIS upstream (at 5-85 MHz or 5-100 MHz), another band for the legacy downstream (perhaps at 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz), with a band sandwiched in the middle (say, 100 MHz to 700 MHz) that’s dedicated to the FDX operation.

“There might be some variations there, but at a high level, that's the kind of spectrum some people are talking about,” Cloonan said, noting that FDX could be initially targeted to plant that has already deployed N+0 along with a move to remote/distributed architectures that move the PHY or the MAC and PHY closer to the edge.

Though the specs for FDX are still in flux, Cloonan said there’s some optimism that the technology could be ready by as early as 2018, but sees 2019 as the year when it sees its true heyday.

“There’s a force-function to make it happen quickly,” he said. “A very high level, there's an awful lot of interest in Full Duplex DOCSIS among the MSO community.”

Comcast is among the MSOs that’s shown interest in FDX.

“With Full Duplex, we’re witnessing the emergence of yet another powerful tool for delivering leading-edge speed and performance to Internet customers,” Dr. Robert Howald, vice president, network architectures at Comcast, said in a statement to Multichannel News. “We take an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach when it comes to providing choice to our Internet customers.”

Comcast has already launched D3.1-powered gigabit services in Atlanta, Nashville and Chicago, with Miami and Detroit among those that are already on deck.

“Full duplex is also an impressive reminder of both the flexibility and power of the Hybrid Fiber Coaxial model, and of the tremendous innovation that continues unchecked in HFC technology,” Howald noted. “The toolbox gets bigger and better every year, and our focus is on using those tools to deliver the best possible experiences to customers.”

FDX and a move to distributed architectures “could go hand-in-hand” as MSOs conceive their deployment strategies, Jeffrey Leung, director of product management at Casa Systems, said.

As operators go fiber-deep, “that will be potentially a perfect time to change,” he added. “In order to prepare yourself to go with these technologies, remote PHY will be a key requisite.”

Still, going with FDX or just taking that next step, and pulling fiber all the way to the home, is a point of debate.

"It becomes an interesting business case analysis that each MSO has to do individually, and the answer is likely to be different for each MSO,” Cloonan said, noting that Arris continues to make bets on both options. "We're a firm believer that DOCSIS has a long life ahead of it. We also know that PON has good life coming ahead of it as well.”

Cisco Systems is also placing bets on FDX. Last month, Cisco introduced a silicon reference design for Full Duplex DOCSIS alongside a pledge to contributing the design on a royalty-free basis to the cable industry in order to accelerate the speed of the technology’s development and eventual deployment.

Nokia, meanwhile, has also been keeping its fingers on the pulse of FDX. It demonstrated a prototype of the concept, calling it “XG-CABLE,” in May at the INTX show in Boston.

Taking aim at cable’s symmetrical, multi-gigabit future, Cisco Systems has introduced a silicon reference design for “Full Duplex” DOCSIS, a project underway at CableLabs that could continue to forestall the need for MSOs to squeeze more life out of their HFC networks and forestall the need to pull fiber all the way to the home. 

Cisco said it’s contributing the design on a royalty-free basis to the cable industry in order to accelerate the technology’s development and eventual deployment.

CableLabs introduced the concept of Full Duplex in February, declaring then that the project was in the feasibly/innovation phase and that the hope was that it would eventually become an enhancement/addition to the DOCSIS specs. DOCSIS 3.1 is currently designed to support downstream capacities of 10 Gbps down and at least 1 Gbps upstream. Full Duplex aims to get rid of those upstream/downstream spectrum splits and pave a path to symmetrical 10 Gbps capabilities.  

Full Duplex DOCSIS is being optimized for “passive” HFC networks as MSOs push fiber deeper and continue to eliminate the amplifiers present between the node and the home. Up for debate, is whether it makes more sense to take that route or just take fiber the rest of the way. DOCSIS gear vendors like the notion of Full Duplex in part because it helps to preserve their technologies and provide a path to future product upgrades.

Though Full Duplex is considered a longer-term project for the cable industry, which is just now starting to deploy D3.1, Nokia demoed a prototype of the concept, something it called “XG-CABLE,” in May at the INTX show in Boston.

CableLabs has said that Full Duplex will require some key tech around self-interference cancellation.

Cisco said more than 20 of its engineers developed a “validated” reference design for a “digital echo canceler” that can maximize HFC capacity,  and have defined a “multi-slice scalable echo canceler (EC)” for the emerging Full Duplex DOCSIS specs that can work with cable modem termination system (CMTS) architecture.

The technology is  also scalable for a return path from 200 MHz (1.7 Gbps) to 1.2 GHz (10 Gbps), said Cisco, which is demonstrating it at this week’s CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, Colo.

“By making this royalty-free design available to the industry, we can help our cable customers evolve to more rapidly deploy virtualized, fiber-deep, and all-IP infrastructures,” John Chapman, fellow and CTO of Cisco’s Cable Access Business, said in a statement.“We hope to accelerate the transformation of the cable industry to deliver multi-gigabit speeds and new high bandwidth services and products, and in the near future, customers can begin to enjoy the benefits of Full Duplex DOCSIS technology.”

Cisco’s contribution also earned some praise from the MSO community.

“DOCSIS 3.1 Full Duplex with up to 50 times more upstream capacity than today and echo cancellation technology, is further evidence that DOCSIS and the cable network itself has a long, useful life ahead,” said Jeff Finkelstein, executive director, Network Strategy, Cox Communications. “The work being done on Full Duplex by the MSO, vendor and CableLabs team shows that the cable network will continue to evolve and deliver high bandwidth services for many years, enabling our customers to enjoy the services most important to them to meet their future needs.”

“As we continue adding new DOCSIS 3.1-powered gigabit markets and customers across our footprint, we’re excited to see that the pace of innovation is still accelerating ahead,” added Dr. Robert Howald, vice president, Network Architectures, Comcast. “Full Duplex represents an important evolutionary step for DOCSIS 3.1, and we are actively participating with CableLabs and industry partners on this key initiative.”