Charter CEO: Focus on symmetrical speeds due to marketing, not need

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge isn’t sold on the idea that consumers need symmetrical broadband speeds, but says it has a roadmap to offer them using DOCSIS 3.1 technology to keep up with competition from fiber players. Rutledge said, “It’s a marketing claim. It’s a claim without much reality from a [data] use perspective…Even one gig down is to some extent a marketing claim from a reality perspective.” However, to the extent that it needs to keep up with such claims from competitors, Rutledge said it can. He pointed to DOCSIS 3.1 as one avenue to upgrade its network, stating it has a pathway to “take that up to multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds and to do that very inexpensively, without having to change out any of the CPE.” In the future, it can also tap into DOCSIS 4.0 to get it to 10-gig speeds to stay on par with fiber service, he said.