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Is faster cable internet service in your future? We asked Greg Zancewicz, Director of Broadband Marketing for Microtune, which provide RF (radio frequency) technology for TVs, Internet devices, cars, and phones. Their tuners are used by the leading supplier of cable modems worldwide and the leading supplier of voice-over-IP (VoIP)-enabled cable modems for cable telephony services.

Microtune has just announced a new consumer cable tuner, the MicroTuner MT2064, which expands modem bandwidth to 1-GigaHertz (GHz) networks, while drawing only 800 milliWatts of power. The tuner will be especially useful for VoIP, providing reliable levels of quality and functionality. Initial production is planned for early third quarter of 2007.

Note from Ed - I failed signal theory at Uni, so I hope the following is right for those that don’t know… The throughput you get in MBps at your cable modem is a function of the bandwidth in Hz and the modulation schemes amongst other things. The more Hz or the more efficient your modulation, the more MBps for you… and that’s a good thing

A 1 GHz network is still fast and new. Right now, most cable networks operate at 54 to 870 MHz downstream, but Zancewicz says, “From talking with network equipment suppliers, we understand that cable operators are specifying 1 GHz equipment for the majority of new builds and upgrades, whether or not they intend to deploy 1 GHz immediately or not. So in many cases the tuner inside the set-top or cable modem is the last component needed to enable full 1 GHz operation.”

Do people really need all that data speed coming into their homes? After all, how much does it really matter if it takes one second or ten seconds to download that new Linkin Park song? But Zancewicz points out that the way we are starting to use the Internet will require a lot more bandwidth. “The actual data rate required today for a high-definition MPEG-2 video stream in a 6-MHz cable channel today is between 10 and 20 Mbps,” he says. And if people in the house are watching two different high-definition programs, recording a third one, and downloading data in the background, a household might need 40 to 50 Mbps at peak times. New techniques such as MPEG-4 encoding or higher order modulation schemes such as 1024QAM still wouldn’t drop that bandwidth requirement below 20 Mbps.

- Michael M