If you haven’t already heard it, you will soon be hearing the term ‘gigasphere’. This is the marketing term that the large cable companies are adopting to describe their upward path towards having faster data speeds on their cable systems. The phrase is obviously meant as a marketing counter to the commonly used term of gigabit fiber.

The gigasphere term is being promoted by the National Cable Television Association (NTCA) as the way to describe the new DOCSIS 3.1 technology. This is a technology that can theoretically support cable modem speeds up to 10 Gbps download and 1 Gbps upload.

The large cable companies are all starting to feel consumer pressure from fiber, even in markets where fiber is not readily available. Google and other fiber providers have excited the public with the idea of gigabit speeds and I am sure cable companies are being asked about this frequently.

Right now the term gigasphere is largely marketing hype. If you have fiber to your home or business, then with the right electronics you can get gigabit speeds. But cable systems have a long way to go before they can offer gigabit speeds over coaxial cable. There is already talk of cable companies offering gigabit products, such as the recent announcements from Comcast. But these speeds are not being achieved using coaxial cable and DOCSIS 3.1, they are using fiber – something Comcast doesn’t highlight in their marketing.

With enough upgrades and money, the cable systems can eventually achieve gigabit speeds on their coaxial networks. But for now their speeds are significantly less than that. A cable company faces a long and complicated path to be able to offer gigabit speeds over coaxial cable. Their biggest hurdle is that the bandwidth on their cable systems is mostly used by TV channels, and only empty channel spaces can be used for data. DOCSIS 3.1 allows a cable system to join together the spare channels on their network into one larger data pipe.

In order to get to gigabit speeds a cable company has to convert all of the channels on its network to digital, something most of them have already done. But further, they are going to need to treat them the same as TV on the web – transmitting them as raw data instead of as individual channels. Cable systems today use a broadcast technology, meaning they send all of the channels to customers at the same time. But if they convert to IPTV they can send each home just the channels they want to watch, which would massively condense the system bandwidth needed for television.

But this conversion is going to be costly and the equipment to do it is not yet readily available. CableLabs is working on this technology and it ought to be on the market in a few years. But that change alone is not the whole price of conversion. An IPTV system will require all new settop boxes, and in many systems a major reworking of the power taps and other components of the outside cable network. I don’t see many cable companies rushing towards this expensive conversion unless they are in a market where it is competitively necessary.

So for now, the gigasphere is mostly a marketing phrase. But it’s one that you are going to start hearing all of the time in relation to cable system data capabilities. This will obviously confuse the public who will assume that gigasphere means that they will be able to buy gigabit speeds from their cable companies, when they almost certainly cannot.

It’s not like cable companies don’t have fairly fast data capabilities. Most urban systems today are already capable of speeds in excess of 200 Mbps download. And there are systems working to get to 500 Mbps, which is probably about as fast as you can go without converting to IPTV. But it seems the marketing folks in the industry are counting on the fact that customers won’t know the difference between the various flavors of fast and will be happy with their gigasphere products. And they are probably right. Where’s my 500 Mbps cable modem?