The debate for cable operators has long centered about when and if they'll ultimately have to deploy fiber to the home as coaxial cable starts to run out of leg room. For most carriers this has yet to be a problem (particularly as upstream bonding gets established), and a new standard may help them delay that move a little longer, if not indefinitely.
A new Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard dubbed EPON-over-Coax (EPoC) is just getting developed, and could offer symmetrical 10 Gbps speeds over hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks. The standard however has numerous architectural hurdles to leap before creation, including to OFDM or not to OFDM:
EPoC could begin to steer cable away from its traditional QAM modulation schemes, and this part of the discussion is expected to be among the most hotly debated as engineers mull ways to modulate Ethernet on coax efficiently. One idea that will get much attention is orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a scheme popular in the wireless world that could help cable pump out more bits per hertz than they do today with QAM, says Shane Eleniak, vice president of advanced broadband solutions at CommScope.
If all goes well, the standard could take about three years to complete, which in IEEE's world likely means 2020 or so.read comment(s)