Regional US cableco Midco has announced that it will invest USD500 million in a ten-year phased rollout of 10Gbps technology. Lab trials are already said to be underway, and Midco expects field trials to begin by 2020. Jon Pederson, chief technology officer at Midco, commented: ‘The Midco network is already well prepared for 10G in locations such as Fargo, Dickinson and Annandale, because we’ve built fibre-deep. All future build-outs, line extensions and upgrades will be constructed in the same fashion with fibre pushed deeper into the network – closer to the customer – to ready our network paths for 10G performance.’
In a parallel development, vendor Intel has confirmed that it is also laying the groundwork for the deployment of 10Gbps-capable technology. In a blog post, Intel noted: ‘At the centre of this technology transformation is a new, fully-developed technological standard called ‘10 Gigabit Full Duplex DOCSIS’ (also referred to as ‘10g FDX’). This standard makes it possible to deliver multi-gigabit upload and download speeds over the connections already present in hundreds of millions of homes.’ Comcast, Cox and Charter have been named as Intel’s ‘early partners’ in the push towards 10Gbps.