Kabel Deutschland (KD) is the first cable operator in the world to successfully achieve a download speed of 4.700 Mbit/s (4.7 Gbit/s) via the cable network in a field test. The future-proof network capacity of broadband cable was demonstrated in a field test in the cable network of the city of Schwerin. Back in 2010, KD already achieved a speed test peak of 1.17 Gbit/s in a field test in the cable network of the city of Hamburg. The maximum download speed of 4.7 Gbit/s achieved now in the Schwerin field test enables KD to transmit more bandwidth than current PC and laptops could process.
Customers of Kabel Deutschland living in houses with a modernised inhouse network are already able to surf the internet with up to 100 Mbit/s in the cable network of the city of Schwerin which has been upgraded to 862 MHz. The Schwerin field test shows that an 862 MHz upgraded cable network is able to broadcast download speeds of up to 4.7 Gbit/s. „Using this speed, a DVD could theoretically be downloaded within eight seconds. Current standard laptops or modems cannot even process these high speeds. It will take many more years until users find online services and web content that need a download speed of up to 4.7 Gbit/s”, explained Lorenz Glatz, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Kabel Deutschland. „The Schwerin field test demonstrates that the broadband cable network is already today a high-performance and sustainable infrastructure offering huge untapped potential. At the same time, it is the only broadband infrastructure in Germany that is able to provide these high bandwidths extensively”, says Dr. Adrian v. Hammerstein, CEO of Kabel Deutschland.
The field test was carried out on a test account in a school in the modernised cable network of the city of Schwerin. Works such as civil engineering were not needed. The 4.7 Gbit/s field test is completely based upon already available standards, technologies and hardware. In co-operation with technology leader ARRIS, KD uses the EuroDocsis 3.0 standard that is being extensively utilised in the footprint of Kabel Deutschland. The KD head-end in Schwerin used a standard commercial ARRIS C4® CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System, the counterpart of the cable provider to the cable modem in the customer household) from ARRIS. In the school KD connected a broadband test setup of twelve ARRIS Touchstone CM820S cable modems that supplied the download speed by channel bundling. „Our field test with a download speed of significantly more than 4 Gbit/s was a complete success and underlines once more the possibilities of a cable network as the only extensive ultra-broadband network in the German broadband market”, Glatz summarises.