Saturday, August 14, 2021

How many people share a DOCSIS line in a typical cable deployment? How much bandwidth is shared per node?

My cable modem has 32x8 DOCSIS 3.0 channels and 2x2 DOCSIS 3.1 channels. Out of the 3.1 channels, only one is used for downstream and only if you are on a gigabit plan.

I don't know how many channels the ISP has enabled at the CMTS per node, I'm not exactly sure how that works. Is it basically the max for the DOCSIS standard? After all, coax will only support so many channels, even the trunk cables carry the same amount, correct? They just attenuate less.

So let's assume the trunk cables carry 32x8 DOCSIS 3.0 and 2 DOCSIS 3.1 full channels. I'm sure they haven't enabled DOCSIS 3.1 on the upstream. That's basically 256 + 192 + 192 = 640 MHz of total download and only 51.2 MHz for the upload, total 700 MHz on the cable for internet and the rest for cable TV, makes sense.

So that means the total capacity for the entire node is about 5 gbps down and 200 mbps up (assuming they use the full capacity of the DOCSIS 3.1 channels). That can't be because they subscribe 200 people per node and they offer gigabit connections. Are there multiple trunk cables coming off of each node? What am I missing? How much bandwidth is typically shared per node?

Sorry, lots of questions...



No comments:

Post a Comment