www. dowinside. com ® ™ Trademark of The Dow Chemical Company Dow Electrical & Telecommunications is a global business unit of The Dow Chemical Company and its subsidiaries. Experience the Power of Dow Inside Connecting people, across a room or around the globe— there are thousands of ways to do it and new ones appear daily. For six decades, Dow Electrical & Telecommunications has provided the innovation and materials to help you make better connections. We’ve helped the industry stay steps ahead with a full line of jacketing and insulation materials for cables ranging from twisted pair to coax and RF to fiber optics, all with the power of DOW INSIDE . As the wired world goes wireless and new technologies evolve, we haven’t forgotten our role— providing the leadership, materials and technology solutions that ensure your success. FEATURE Annual technology forecast 2013 CABLE OPERATORS and the technology developers that serve them spent much of 2012 dreaming up ways to ensure that coax networks will enjoy continued relevance in a high bandwidth world. For example, the big technological news out of last month’s SCTE Cable- Tec Expo in Orlando, FL, was the launch of DOCSIS 3.1 standards efforts. DOCSIS 3.1 will support 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream on hybrid fiber/ coax ( HFC). SCTE expects the specification to be more or less in place by the middle of next year, which means technology development will be well underway by the year’s end. While this specification work is underway, a concurrent, if perhaps slower moving, IEEE standards effort also threatens the opportunities for optical technology in the networks of cable MSOs. The EPON over coax ( EPoC) effort, as its name implies, seeks to bring the benefits of passive optical networks to cable operators without having to move off their HFC networks. Counterbalancing these fiber retardant efforts, DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON ( DPoE) appears finally ready for deployment. Version 2.0 of the specification, completed last spring, rounded out DPoE’s Carrier Ethernet capabilities. The next piece of the puzzle, the Demarc Automatic Configuration ( DAC) specification that will spell out how to configure ONUs in a manner similar to DOCSIS cable modems, should be in place by the end of this year. And CableLabs has established a certification program for products designed to Version 1 of the specifications. All of that should lead to DPoE deployments at some point in 2013, sources tell Lightwave . Most believe cable operators will likely use the technology to support business services first. But at least some EPON vendors insist that DPoE will see use in residential applications as well. Perhaps that’s true – DOCSISfriendly EPON OLTs could be used to drive EPoC networks. Coax fends off the fiber challenge _____________