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NOT MANY, BUT DONTTELL GOOGLE - ORTHE CABLE OPERATORS CHASING IT
Most U.S. viewers can't even define a Gigabit of data, much less demand it in their homes.
Yet despite this ignorance - and dearth of desire - among most consumers, many major traditional-TV distributors are quietly scrambling to enhance their networks to make them capable of ? Gigabit per second, a speed that's literally lightning-fast. If the average Internet speed of 7.2 Mbps was correlated to miles per hour, a "car" would travel 7.2 miles per hour. At 1 Gig, this car would clock in at 1,025 miles per hour.
As cable operators prepare for these upgrades, a new generation of DOCSIS 3.0 modems can now provide Gigabit-class speed bursts by bonding 24 downstream channels, and on the horizon are modems that can bond 32 downstream channels - enough to hit speed bursts of 1.2 Gbps and allow MSOs to offer tiers with advertised speeds in the range of 300 Mbps to 400 Mbps. The budding, fast-tracked DOCSIS 3.1 platform, meanwhile, is already setting cable's sights on multi-Gigabit speeds - up to 10 Gbps in the downstream and 1 Gbps in the upstream.
Oddly, what's driving this speed race isn't consumer demand, at least not right now, but a competitor - a very big one. Google Fiber has now announced intentions to wire up three U.S. cities (see chart, opposite page) with 1 Gigabit-persecond fiber, not so much to compete directly with entrenched MSOs as to spur them into upgrading.
Already, operators are responding to ensure that the industry isn't caught flat-footed by the competition now or later, when consumers are likely to actually need that much bandwidth pouring into their homes.
'GOOGLE FIBER EFFECT
But is cable falling prey to the "Google Fiber Effect" and getting 1 Gig-ready faster than it would have if Google Fiber did not exist?
"1 think the practical answer to that is yes," John Chapman, a Cisco engineering fellow and the chief technology officer of the company's cable access business unit, said. "We saw...