In recent years, cable operators have been experiencing very low or even negative growth of TV subscribers. Fortunately, increasing growth of their broadband business has been able to compensate for the loss of video subscribers. The higher speeds offered by DOCSIS has been superior to the lower and distance-dependent speeds offered by xDSL. This has been crucial for enabling MSO broadband growth. However, MSOs now experience increasing broadband competition coming from FTTH operators. In some countries, FTTH rollout happens surprisingly fast, and it is even quite common to see FTTH operators overbuilding cable networks.

In response, many cable operators have already started to deploy FTTH when expanding their network footprint, and even more are preparing to do so. Many practical issues need to be addressed when introducing this new network technology. Training, IT, network management, spare parts, test equipment, etc. are only a few challenges, but new, unified access technologies, that provide both DOCSIS and FTTH on the same platform, can help to solve a good part of these issues. So MSOs are on the right long-term track when expanding their footprint, but because of the high FTTH rollout speeds of the competition, MSOs urgently need to consider an even faster upgrade of their brownfield cable networks in order to meet the challenge.

Fortunately, the technology itself is not the problem. By introducing DOCSIS 3.1 with the high split of 204 MHz, the cable network can get a capacity of about 10 Gbit/s downstream and 1 Gbit/s upstream. We have seen MSOs who have done such upgrades, and since 2017, they have been able to offer commercial services of 1 Gbit/s downstream and 500 Mbit/s upstream. With such products, speed is no longer a reason to churn from cable to fiber.