Much of Europe is looking at DOCSIS 3.1 along with a possible upgrade to 1.2GHz, according to the Finnish cable tech firm Teleste.
“We’re at a moment where all the industry needs to make it happen; it’s about deployment,” said Hanno Narjus, SVP Broadband and Solutions, Teleste. “Almost all of our products are now capable of reaching 1Gbps. The challenge has been how the networks are going to behave not only at 1.2GHz upstream, but also the return path.
Already 80,000 active DOCSIS 3.1 units have been shipped by the company; comprising 30,000 amplifiers, 20,000 nodes and 30,000 optical devices.
Narjus says the time to deployment is being drastically reduced. “When operators previously wanted to do upgrades they had four to five year upgrade plans. Now there’s a sense of urgency and they want to do it in two.”
Finnish operator DNA recently became the first in Europe to run a 1 Gbps service.
“One of the incentives is that there is no space in Finland’s network,” said DNA CTO Kari Ruposa. “We’ve had more and more experiences regarding DOCSIS 3.1 and then we decided we would upgrade to 1.2 GHz.”
Narjus added that he expected the other Nordic countries to follow on the upgrade route alongside Europe as a whole with the possible exception of Germany.
As ever lack of bandwidth is a key issue, particularly in those markets where analogue TV still remains.