Canadian MSO Videotron is joining the Gigabit club.
The company announced this week that it is piloting a 1-Gig service in Montreal using DOCSIS 3.0, with plans underway to follow-up with a commercial launch.
State-of-the-art D3.0 modems can bond up to 32 downstream channels, enough to produce bursts up to 1.2 Gbps in North American DOCSIS networks that use 6MHz-wide channels, and up to 1.6 Gbps using EuroDOCSIS 8MHz-wide channels.
Videotron, which already offers a 200 Mbps downstream by 50 Mbps residential broadband tier using DOCSIS 3.0, noted that the pilot, which offers speeds of 1 Gbps ore more “under certain conditions” has been underway for several months with Montreal-area homes and businesses. It’s delivering it with new modems and an “optimized network architecture.”
Videotron also referenced its interest in DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks that should be ready for deployment next year.
“Reaching the gigabit per second threshold in this technological test makes the potential of our state-of-the-art network that much more palpable,” said Manon Brouillette, Videotron’s president and CEO, in a statement. “In light of the pilot project’s results, we plan to go ahead with commercial roll-out of the new service. Details will be announced at a later date.”
Videotron serves about 1.77 million cable TV subs, and 1.54 million high-speed Internet customers. Its primary competitor is Bell Canada.
