Summary Bullets:
• Huawei’s Gigaband concept, introduced in early 2015, simply proposes that with Gigabit broadband speeds now commercially available, Gigaband is a more appropriate, logical descriptor, superceding a more generic “broadband” definition.
• While competitors and some industry pundits have characterized Gigaband as a Huawei-driven marketing initiative, the reality is the Gigaband is an almost ideal mash-up word (or, portmanteau) derived from its longer-form parent words Giga(bit) (broad)band.
Just last week, U.S. cable operator Comcast announced limited commercial trials of DOCSIS 3.1 (cable modem-based) services in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania market. While no specific customer broadband speeds have been revealed, DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to support multi-Gigabit throughput to each cable node (10 Gbps downstream, and 1 Gbps upstream, albeit over the shared cable plant). So, even in a moderately-contended node – for example, one serving 125 to 250 customer premises/households – Comcast can offer downstream Gigabit access services, at least from a “billboard” (advertised) standpoint.
Continue reading “Huawei’s Gigaband Proposition: Why Not?”