When Charter Communications’ former CEO Tom Rutledge was still leading the company in May 2022, he said, the idea that fiber is a superior technology to hybrid fiber coax (HFC) was “just dead wrong.” After Fierce Telecom wrote a story with that quote, we received a some vehement emails about his statement, even though we were just the messenger. These emailers suggested that Rutledge, himself, was “just dead wrong.”
More than a year has passed since Rutledge’s comments. And even though you’ll never find a cable company that will denigrate its HFC network, it does appear that a few cable companies are now deploying more fiber, even as they simultaneously upgrade their existing HFC plant.
Once such company is Midco, a midwestern service provider that offers broadband via HFC, fiber-to-the-home, and fixed wireless access (FWA). It serves 490,000 homes and businesses in 400 communities in Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Ben Dold, Midco’s chief operations officer, said the company is doing greenfield fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) builds in new communities and to large multi-dwelling units. But in brownfields, it’s doing a mix, adding fiber deeper into neighborhoods, but also upgrading its cable plant.
“The good thing is DOCSIS 3.1 has a long runway to continue to improve speeds,” said Dold. “Right now, our near term is to continue to bring fiber deeper and push DOCSIS 3.1 further as we evaluate.”
Nate Kinzer, Midco’s director of Network Intelligence, said the company looks at a couple of factors to decide whether FTTP or a cable upgrade make the most sense. For one, it looks for a high penetration of business customers, in which case FTTP is warranted. Also, it likes to deploy fiber via existing aerial plant.
But sometimes HFC upgrades just make more sense, in Midco’s view.
Dold said the DOCSIS roadmap from 3.1 to 4.0 “does bring tremendous speeds that rival fiber.” And he said it’s pretty disruptive to overbuild HFC with fiber. “There’s tremendous value in that coax drop,” and going “full fiber” also requires new equipment in the home, which can be costly. “With DOCSIS you can take advantage of the drop to the home and the existing CPE,” he said.
From a network engineer’s perspective, Kinzer said Midco wants to get fiber “deep enough to set us up for the future,” but not make radical overbuild decisions too early that “we may not be too happy with.”
PON technology
In terms of its fiber deployments, Midco is using 10G EPON. Even though other service providers have moved on to XGS PON, cable companies are kind of tied to 10G EPON because it’s compatible with the existing DOCSIS Ethernet-based provisioning, while XGS PON is not.
Dold said, “I think the industry in general is evaluating the different paths. Everybody’s network is different. Everybody comes at it from a different angle.”
At a Fierce Telecom Optical Summit last week, Zac Cronauer, fiber network manager with the cable MSO Blue Ridge Communications talked a bit about PON.
Pennsylvania-based Blue Ridge is in the process of rebuilding its HFC network with fiber and using XGS-PON technology. The company has about 250,000 subscribers. And Cronauer said it’s currently passed about 20% of them with fiber. Eighty percent of its deployment is aerial and 20% is underground.
He said XGS PON doubles the split ratio of EPON, enabling it to reach twice as many homes and easing the cost burden for providers.
Of DOCSIS 4.0 he said that it’s still on the horizon and not a proven solution today. While fiber can be deployed now.