Fiber Vs. DOCSIS 4.0: How Long Will Fiber’s Edge Last?

Telephone companies (telcos) that have been deploying fiber broadband are having a moment in the sun, finally reversing years of broadband subscriber losses to the cable companies. But will this last? What has given telcos an edge is fiber broadband’s ability to support gigabit and even multi-gigabit speeds bi-directionally. With traditional technology, cable companies can offer gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds but only in the downstream direction. Upstream speeds sometimes top out at just 20 Mbps. All that is set to change, though. Curtis Knittle, vice president of wired technologies for Cablelabs believes that upstream speeds are poised to get a lot faster – maybe not fully symmetrical, but probably fast enough for most consumers. Perhaps of greater concern, it’s still a lot easier to upgrade cable hybrid fiber coax (HFC) infrastructure than it is to replace telco copper with fiber. (HFC networks use fiber networks from the cable company headend to a node where signals are converted to coaxial cable for delivery to customer locations.) To maximize speeds, cable companies will be deploying DOCSIS 4.0, the next generation of the DOCSIS standard. They also will be deploying, and in some cases already have deployed, distributed access architecture (DAA). In addition, cable companies are expanding the amount of spectrum that is available for use within the coaxial portion of the link and making more of that spectrum available for upstream communications. For telcos, the process of upgrading existing DSL networks to fiber broadband takes longer and, in some cases, the upgrade to fiber may not be cost-effective.