U.S. Finally Close to Catching Up

Hooray! It looks like cable companies in the U.S. are going to be able to provide improved bandwidth at rates as high as 160 Mbps within the next 3-5 years. I know, the whole 3-5 years thing is always said, and generally repeated every year, but this time it might actually happen. With increasing competition from AT&T's and Verizon's fiber networks, cable companies have a big reason to look at bumping up speeds. The increase comes from upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 from the currently used 1.1. This technology provides a number of other improvements including support for IPv6. Another incentive to cable is that they can roll out the new tech without large infrastructure improvements, especially if they've already laid a mixed fiber/coax network. This is especially good news because it means that there can be a faster deployment. Any sort of major deployment of the new technology is not expected until 2008, and is likely to have slower expansion than telco's fiber networks. While I'd personally choose something like FiOS over this if it was available, I'm guessing that cable may be able to reach certain areas faster than the fiber networks. Fortunately, I don't think that will be the case for me, as FiOS is literally moving up the street in my direction.
From ArsTechnica.