10Gbps cable Internet uploads and downloads coming in DOCSIS update

Cable Internet with download and upload speeds of 10Gbps may eventually come to American homes thanks to a new specification for higher-speed, symmetrical data transmissions. The industry's R&D consortium, CableLabs, announced that it has completed the Full Duplex Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an update to DOCSIS 3.1.

The completion of the 10Gbps full duplex spec comes 18 months after the project was unveiled. The completion of the spec doesn't mean you'll suddenly be getting multi-gigabit uploads and downloads, as commercial deployments may be at least a couple of years away and may not initially provide the maximum speeds allowed by the spec. The initial version of DOCSIS 3.1 was announced in 2013 and allowed 10Gbps downloads and 1Gbps uploads, but the first modems weren't certified until early 2016, and real-world implementations are still catching up. Comcast last year began offering gigabit download speeds over cable using DOCSIS 3.1, but the service limited uploads to 35Mbps. Comcast's only symmetrical gigabit service uses fiber-to-the-home instead of cable, as fiber technologies have supported symmetrical transmissions at gigabit speeds for years.