Blog
February 13, 2023
Setting the Record Straight: MSOs Love Fiber
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Is there anything more frustrating than someone picking a fight with you on a subject in which you’re in 100-percent agreement? Thousands of words have been devoted in just the first few weeks of this year alone to the fallacy that cable operators are anti-fiber. One recent online [...]
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January 27, 2023
Why it’s Way Past Time (about 2000 Years) to Upgrade Your Backup Power Operations
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | The battery, that near-ubiquitous energy storage source, has been the primary backup power medium for broadband communications providers for the past several decades. Nearly everything that runs on electricity, in fact, cars, phones, smartwatches — you name it — relies on battery power to keep moving, processing and [...]
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December 22, 2022
Why the Case for DOCSIS 4.0 will only get Stronger in 2023
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Three of my favorite end-of-year events are ATX’s annual Ugly Holiday Sweater contest, reordering my Word-of-the-Day desk calendar and digesting the banquet of industry blogs and articles offering predictions for the coming year. ATX, with an assist from our friends at BTR, contributed to the cornucopia of 2023 [...]
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November 10, 2022
How ATX is Helping Build a Broadband Cathedral
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | You don’t need to be an art historian to know that Europe is dotted with dozens of soaring stone cathedrals that date back to the 12th century. From an architecture-appreciation standpoint, it’s nearly impossible to stand before one of these majestic structures and not be awed by the [...]
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September 30, 2022
Top Five Takeaways from Cable-Tec Expo 2022
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | In addition to regrets over consuming the second half of that jumbo cheesesteak, the safe bet is that the majority of Cable-Tec Expo attendees left Philadelphia last week with a sense of excitement and opportunity about the continued broadband dominance of cable operators well into the future. Feel [...]
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August 8, 2022
Will the HFC Network ever Get to 3GHz?
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Cable companies knew what they were doing more than a half century ago when they selected coaxial cable as their preferred medium. Estimates vary, but most cable technology experts calculate that modern coax cable is capable of supporting frequencies topping off between 6–10GHz, meaning that MSOs could theoretically [...]
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June 15, 2022
Ode to a Very Fast HFC Network
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | The American poet T.S. Eliot famously wrote “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” Cable industry veterans may have been thinking something similar, with megabits substituting for spoons, when witnessing the April 27th demonstration of a prototype DOCSIS® 4.0 FDD network at this Spring’s 10G Showcase [...]
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May 25, 2022
MSOs: Don’t get Knocked Off Course by the ‘Fiber Frenzy’
By Jay Lee, ATX Chief Technology Officer and Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Fiber, let’s face it, is on a roll. In the past year or so, the future prospects of broadband service providers building out FTTH networks have brightened. A windfall of public funding dedicated to closing the so-called Digital Divide appears disproportionately [...]
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May 13, 2022
Debunking the Fiber is Faster than Coax Myth
By Joe McGarvey, Marketing Director | When it comes to the evolutionary path of the HFC network, all roads lead to fiber, a broadband transmission medium offering almost limitless bandwidth. That’s the reason cable operators routinely — and almost exclusively — pull PON technology out of their toolboxes when it comes to greenfield buildouts. Fiber, [...]
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March 16, 2022
ATX Reveals Findings of 2nd Annual HFC Evolution Survey
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | The instillation of the first fiber nodes in the cable access plant in the early 1990s gave birth to the Hybrid Fiber-Coax network. What seemed like an inauspicious event at the time, turned out to be the launch date of the world’s most robust and resilient delivery system [...]
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