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If you’re already getting tired of hype over the wireless industry’s plans for 5G broadband, rejoice—the cable industry would like you to set that aside for its “10G” pitch.
That’s not 10 as in a tenth generation of broadband, but as in 10 gigabits per second—10 times as fast as the 1-gigabit connections some 80% of cable services and most fiber-optic services now offer.
You can also think of this as a full 400 times faster than the Federal Communications Commission’s 25 Mbps definition of “broadband.”
Yes, that will be overkill for watching cat videos. 10G’s real payoff for customers will be uploads as fast as those downloads, making it much easier to share cat videos—and rely on online storage and backup.
Fast, but how soon?
The cable industry says it will make 10G happen soon—a post at the cable lobby NCTA’s site from its president Michael Powell calls it “a transformation already underway.” The timeline calls for 10G tests starting in 2020, which suggests retail availability sometime in 2022 or 2023.
“Typically consumer launches start 12-18 months after field trials are completed,” wrote Todd Smith, spokesman for Cox Communications, the third-largest cable provider. “Within a few years, we expect our customers to have 10 gig as a broadband speed choice.”
Phil McKinney, CEO of the cable-research group CableLabs, emphasized how 10G builds on earlier efforts to deliver faster speeds.
“There’s nothing left to invent,” he said—and your cable operator shouldn’t need to string new wires.
Indeed, CableLabs finished its specification for 10-Gbps downloads and uploads in December 2016. The new part of this, McKinney said, are the other technologies documented at the CableLabs site, such as WiFi fast enough to distribute this bandwidth.
The part of this you need
The obvious part of 10G should be symmetric uploads that cure today’s severe imbalance. For example, gigabit-download service from Comcast (CMCSA) only offers uploads ”up to 35 Mbps.”
That gap holds back residential users a little, commercial customers more. “Slow upstreams are obviously a problem for businesses, where much of the cable growth is,” emailed Dave Burstein, analyst and editor of Fast Net News.
In competitive markets, it can lead customers to switch to fiber-optic services—Yahoo Finance corporate parent Verizon (VZ) is one such provider—that already offer full-speed uploads.
Cable operators don’t have such an obvious business case for 10-gigabit downloads in homes.
“It’s hard to make the case that anyone really needs 1 Gbps, much less 10,” e-mailed Craig Moffett, senior analyst at MoffettNathanson.