The cable industry has begun a marketing campaign for 10Gbps broadband services, even though cable companies haven't finished rolling out 1Gbps connections. The first 10Gbps cable broadband connections will be deployed in field trials starting in 2020, according to cable industry lobby group NCTA.

Following longstanding telecom industry traditions, the new marketing campaign for a technology that no one can use yet comes with a potentially confusing name: 10G.

Cable lobby group NCTA kicked off its campaign today with an announcement titled "Introducing 10G: The Next Great Leap for Broadband" alongside a new "10G" website. NCTA said it has trademarked "10G."

People who don't follow the telecom world closely might wonder if a 10G network is created by doubling 5G, which is what the wireless industry calls its fifth-generation mobile technology—well, aside from AT&T, which is telling customers that its 4G network is actually "5G."

NCTA's announcement even directly compares 5G to 10G as if one is an upgrade to the other, even though one refers to mobile broadband and the other refers to home Internet service. "While the world is talking about 5G, we're proud to be part of this extraordinary movement to 10G," NCTA quotes a Liberty Global executive as saying.

But of course, the "G" here stands for gigabit, not generation. Actually calling 10-gigabit-per-second cable technology something like "10Gbps cable" would make more sense to us and still be short enough to fit in ads. But we aren't marketing experts.

Full-duplex DOCSIS spec

In any case, 10Gbps download and upload speeds will theoretically be possible as part of a full-duplex version of DOCSIS, the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification used by the cable industry. The new DOCSIS spec allowing symmetrical, multi-gigabit broadband speeds was completed in October 2017.

Intel said it is developing network gear and home gateways to support the 10Gbps speeds.

"Our US network partners, including Charter, Comcast, and Cox—three of the nation's largest broadband providers—are working actively to test that technology in their networks," Intel wrote.

Intel said its lab tests are going well and that it is "working with operators to start trialing [10Gbps] in customer homes as early as spring 2020." Arris is also developing 10Gbps equipment and said it will be "announcing pilots shortly."

Cable uploads still much slower than 1Gbps

The full duplex aspect may be more interesting to a lot of users than the 10Gbps speeds. Today, Comcast's gigabit cable has gigabit download speeds but only 35Mbps upload speeds. Charter's gigabit cable service is also limited to 35Mbps uploads, a pittance compared to the generous download rates.

So when will the "10G" campaign bring a substantial increase to cable upload speeds? That's not clear, even though NCTA CEO Michael Powell suggested that the full duplex upgrade could happen quickly, writing that the new version of DOCSIS largely takes advantage of existing infrastructure. "Ten Gigabit Full Duplex DOCSIS, or 10g FDX... makes it possible to deliver multi-gigabit upload and download speeds over the connections already present in hundreds of millions of homes," he wrote.

As Intel says, that means 10Gbps speeds will be possible over existing coaxial networks "without decades of digging and construction."

But there's reason for skepticism about the speed of the future 10Gbps rollout. The existing DOCSIS 3.1, which was announced in 2013 and is widely deployed now, theoretically allows 10Gbps downloads and 1Gbps upload speeds. But cable companies haven't come close to maxing that out on either the download or upload side. As a result, cable companies haven't matched the symmetrical gigabit speeds offered by today's fiber-to-the-home networks.

CableLabs, the cable industry's R&D consortium, says that DOCSIS 3.1 "made deployments of 10Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream broadband speeds a reality." But in what sense is it a "reality," give that actual cable services in the US max out at 1Gbps down and 35Mbps up? The real-world implementations of DOCSIS 3.1 haven't matched the specification's theoretical capabilities.

With that history in mind, the shift to 10Gbps cable could take a while—especially for uploads. In the meantime, one can hope that cable companies improve their upload speeds incrementally while we're waiting for symmetrical multi-gigabit services to become a reality.

And yes, good luck with your data cap.

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.