All 6M Cox customers should have a gig available by the end of 2019.  Correction: I had reported that Cox had intended to offer a gig to all in 2016. I believed that was a commitment to a consumer priced DOCSIS 3.1 service. I was wrong. Cox did have a near-universal gigabit offering, but it was a business priced dedicated fiber, ($thousands, I believe.) 

Todd Smith of Cox writes, "DOCSIS 3.1 is live now with employees and we will begin deploying to customers in some markets later this year. 40 percent of the households we serve nationwide will have access to Gigabit speeds by the end of 2017."

Cox Vice President Philip Nutsugah tells Mari Sibley, "The company plans to reach the rest of its customers (or at least 99% of them) with gigabit broadband by the end of 2019."

50M home giant Comcast expects, "DOCSIS 3.1 across the majority of its footprint by year-end."

Ready for customers 2019-2021. John Chapman made cable engineering history with the first demonstration of full duplex cable at ANGA COM in Cologne, pictured. The setup doesn't look like much until you realize this is the world's first prototype of a 10 gigabit down, 5 gigabit up, cable system. By using the same spectrum upstream and down, remarkable speeds are possible.

Chapman outlined the path to gigabit cable in 2005. Almost no one believed it possible except for a handful of innovative engineers. His ideas became central to DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1. Comcast today is offering the gig downstream to millions of customers. If John says FDX gigabit upstream will work, I'm a true believer. (The schedule isn't guaranteed, of course.)

Full duplex communication has a long history, but not at the speeds of today's wireless and modems. Phil Levis & Sachin Katti of Stanford have spun off Kumu Networks, which has ambitious plans for wireless FDX and inspired renewed interest.

FDX for cable is a harder problem. Cable systems are "point to multipoint" - one central unit, the CMTS, attaches to many homes. The challenge with point to multipoint is that an echo canceller can only be used at the CMTS end.

Peak Internet growth may have been a couple of years ago. For more than a decade, Internet traffic went up ~40% every year. Cisco's VNI, the most accurate numbers available, sees growth this year down to 27% on landlines and falling to 15-20% many places over the next few years. (Chart below) (Thank you, Arielle)

The result: bandwidth cost per month per subscriber will continue flat to down. For large carriers, that's been about $1/month since ~2003. Moore's Law has been reducing equipment costs at a similar rate. This is confirmed by the global carrier spending on service provider routers, which continues about flat per customer.

Mobile growth is staying higher. 40-50% worldwide. Fortunately, mobile technology is moving even faster. With today's level of capex, LTE networks can increase capacity 10x to 15x.

Frontier lost 107K broadband subscribers in Q1. For years, I've been expecting the low capex at Century, Frontier and Windstream would hurt, as their offering falls further and further behind cable. In most of the United States, cable's basic offering is 50-70 megabits down, 5 up. The three mid-sized U.S. telcos offer 5-40 megabits down to most, often at the lower end. Especially at Frontier, marketing has been deceptive. They advertise "up to 100 megabits" when the strong majority of their homes can't get even half that.

The future is now, perhaps. Frontier is down 107K in Q1, while Windstream and Fairpoint also fell.

Use the plastic sheathing around the phone wires as a waveguide. With 1,000x more spectrum, you get 1,000 more speed. Glass fiber optic waveguides can carry 250 terabits. John Cioffi wants to apply similar techniques using the air gaps between the plastic surrounding a billion phone lines.

The proposed terabit DSL can use 300 GHz+ of spectrum, "submillimeter waves." Current DSLs use 100-500 MHz. Higher frequencies just wouldn't make it through a standard copper wire. The signals get weaker (attenuate) very quickly in copper. 500 MHz can only carry about 30 meters. Gigahertz, even less.

Cioffi proposes using the tiny air spaces between the plastic insulated wires as a "waveguide." The signal would travel over the air gaps, not the copper or plastic. Fiber optic, glass or plastic, "guides" the waves; why couldn't the plastic insulation do similar? (The waves are very, very small. They can easily fit in the gaps.) The signal is carried through the air between the wires, not on the copper wires.

Nobody's built a demonstration unit yet, but numerous very respected engineers are impressed by the concept. Using submillimeter frequencies, the telephone binders as waveguides, and massive calculations for "noise cancellation," speeds as high as a terabit should be possible.

Those specifications are at or slightly beyond the state of the art, so building the first unit is still to come. With support, Cioffi believes it can be done in just a few years and commercially soon after. That remains unproven but the industry is alive with enthusiasm.  Technical presentation .

Terabit DSL Proposed By Stanford Professor John Cioffi

One Terabit 100 meters, 100 Gigabits 300 meters, 10 Gigabits 500 meters 

On May 10, 2017, at the Paris G.fast Summit, John Cioffi will describe a path to a terabit over copper. That is not a typographic error, although John's ideas are far beyond the state of the art. G.fast using 106 MHz is now reaching a gigabit. 212 MHz is soon to ship, with correspondingly high data rates. Alcatel has pushed into higher spectrum to demonstrate 10 gigabits. Physicists and astronomers work with submillimeter waves from 300 GHz to 3 terahertz. Nothing like that is used in communications

Wireless systems use much higher frequencies. 28 GHz & 39 GHz 5G millimeter systems are just getting to the field, with millions likely to ship next decade. 70 GHz backhaul systems are in commercial production. Even faster wireless systems are in the labs. Submillimeter waves begin at 300 GHz and go up to 3 terahertz. While speeds like that have not been used in communications, they are common in physics and astronomy. 

I'm pretty sure it won't be that high, but with "unlimited" wireless it should become more of a factor. Parks Associates, a decent research house, just put out a survey, "10% of U.S. broadband households likely to cancel their fixed broadband Internet service over next 12 months. ... 15% of heads-of-household ages 25-34 are likely to cancel their fixed broadband service in the next 12 months."

Wireless broadband is now fast enough many places for almost all practical purposes. Much of the U.S. is covered at 20 meg or more, higher than most DSL. That's enough for 5 HD streams. The speeds in many locations are headed to 50-150 megabits over the next two years. 

The limiting factor has been the cap, often at 2-10 gigabytes.

Estimate for 100% ultra-high speed goes from € 20 billion to € 34.9 billion. Cour des Comptes, the French government auditor, has recommended a rethink of France's plan to bring very high speed to 80% and high speed to 100%. They estimate the cost will be much higher and the expected private investors are not interested. Instead, they call for "un « mix technologique »" 

Sebastian Soriano, chief of regulator ARCEP, warns of "rural desertification and the risk of decommissioning of certain territories, their inhabitants and their businesses." He recommends only modest changes to the plan, such as wholesale operators in rural areas.