The company said it had selected a vendor for high-speed Docsis 4.0 within its operations. Docsis 4.0, specified by US cable standards group CableLabs, will allow residential cable networks to download at up to 10Gbps and also upload – from the customer into the network – at up to 6Gbps.
The winner of the unpriced deal is CommScope, a US Nasdaq-quoted technology company that had earnings of US$2.23 billion in the first quarter of 2022.
The Docsis 4.0 technology is designed for so-called hybrid fibre coax (HFC) TV cable networks, sometimes built 30 years ago with a mixture of coaxial copper cable and fibre, and initially designed just for TV channels.
Docsis (data over cable service interface specification) technology was retrofitted to cable TV networks starting from Docsis 1 in 1997, initially able to carry 40Mbps downstream.
Colin Buechner, managing director and chief network officer at Liberty Global, said: “We selected CommScope to extend the capabilities of our HFC network into the next decade, because of their proven leadership and expertise in Docsis and next-generation networks. Together, we are laying the path to tomorrow’s multi-gigabit services and providing our subscribers across Europe with the world’s most advanced and reliable services.”
The upgrade is potentially available to customers of Liberty Global’s European interests, some of which are joint ventures, including Virgin Media-O2 in the UK, VodafoneZiggo in the Netherlands, Telenet in Belgium, Sunrise UPC in Switzerland, Virgin Media in Ireland and UPC in eastern Europe.
Guy Sucharczuk, CommScope’s president of access network solutions, said: “This is a showcase for the global transformation of HFC into tomorrow’s 10G networks, and we’re excited to deploy this technology in Europe and beyond.”
