Blog
February 19, 2025
Unlocking Energy Cost Savings and Improving Sustainability with Hybrid Supercapacitors
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | More than ever, communications service providers are looking for ways to cut electricity costs and operate more sustainably. The good news? Hybrid supercapacitor technology provides a cost-effective path to both goals. Hybrid supercapacitors, including ATX’s Areca™ family of next-generation energy storage modules, are enabling MSOs, wireless operators and other [...]
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January 23, 2025
How the Cable Industry has Transformed in the DOCSIS 4.0 Era
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | Six years ago this month, CableLabs® announced the release of DOCSIS 4.0, the next generation of the venerable data-over-cable specification that has played an instrumental role in making MSOs dominant broadband providers in North America, as well as other parts of the world. Though commercial deployments based on the [...]
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January 9, 2025
Inside ATX’s Michigan Manufacturing Facility: Where Automation Meets Human Expertise
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | Regardless of how precise and productive automation and artificial intelligence grow, neither will completely replace its human model or replicate the nuance and innate ingenuity that produce abstract works of art or masterpieces of literature — or even next-generation outside plant technology. While comparing HFC amplifiers to Hamlet is [...]
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November 5, 2024
Welcome to the Era of the Intelligent HFC Network
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | The secret of great comedy, the saying goes, is timing. But that’s true of most things, including technology. It’s not uncommon for innovative products or solutions to miss making an impact because they were ahead of their time — arriving in advance of market demand or before adjacent or [...]
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October 8, 2024
Digging into the Top 5 Takeaways from SCTE TechExpo
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | September’s SCTE TechExpo24 will go down as one of the most memorable in the history of the annual industry gathering. MSOs of all sizes were impacted by news that Broadcom, Comcast, Charter and other signers of a Joint Development Agreement would make silicon that unifies the FDD and FDX [...]
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September 4, 2024
Not Dead Yet! MSOs Closing in on the Broadband Holy Grail
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | One thing that nearly all technical types have in common is an appreciation for the works of Monty Python, the British comedy troupe that engineers and others with a knack for making things work are fond of quoting. It’s difficult not to slip into Pythonese in the run up [...]
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July 23, 2024
Upgrading Amps? Don’t Get Distracted by the Number in Front of ‘GHz’
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | Normally, we love numbers. The cable industry lexicon wouldn’t be the same without them. It’s how we set milestones (10G) and measure progress (DOCSIS 4.0). When it comes to shopping for your next HFC amplifier or node, though, it might be a good idea to consider concentrating on the [...]
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June 27, 2024
Introducing GigaXtend Orchestrator: The Abracadabra App
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | If the vice president of engineering at a major MSO — make that any MSO, really — stumbled across a dusty lantern of ancient origins, does anyone doubt what his or her first wish would be? If your immediate response isn’t a cavalry of trained technicians, you’re probably not [...]
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June 18, 2024
Will 10G be Enough for Everybody?
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | A hallmark of any technology industry, as well as the advanced-degree-laden engineers and other technologists who invigorate that industry with innovation, is a healthy obsession over what comes next. At any given time, a more-than-trivial percentage of research and development is being devoted to answering questions that are a [...]
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May 7, 2024
MSOs must Execute Next-Phase of HFC Evolution with Timing and Precision to Maintain Broadband Leadership
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | Whether the final destination is DOCSIS® 4.0 or optimizing DOCSIS 3.1 for all its worth, MSOs need to continue to evolve their networks to keep pace with subscriber demand and fend off competitors, including FTTH providers offering multigigabit symmetrical services. But MSOs can’t afford to focus on speed and [...]
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