The recent love letters to DOCSIS 3.0, and this week’s announcement by Charter that they’d be offering 60Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 cable in St. Louis has apparently made Verizon grumpy. The telco yesterday took a shot at DOCSIS 3.0 over at their policy blog. Verizon complains that comparisons between their FTTH FiOS service and DOCSIS 3.0 “ignore some key facts,” namely that DOCSIS 3.0 architecture is shared, and that sometimes hundreds of customers reside on the same node. Says Verizon’s Eric Rabe:

Of course, the “big capital costs” facing cable operators to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 are nothing compared to the cost Verizon has faced in replacing last mile copper with fiber optic cable. The relatively inexpensive costs of upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 are why many cable companies are taking their sweet time in getting it deployed. Rabe is right that Verizon’s upstream capacity remains their most distinct advantage at the moment.

Verizon’s also (so far) not throttling, de-prioritizing or capping protocols or connections and have told me they have no immediate plans to do so. Verizon has also stated they aren’t participating in the RIAA’s plans to boot heavy P2P users, meaning their engineers aren’t particularly concerned with capacity strain. Of course to the average consumer, the choice between DOCSIS 3.0 and FiOS will ultimately come down to price.
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