Blog
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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January 28, 2022
Are Cable Operators Ready for the Metaverse?
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | The metaverse is nothing new to science-fiction fans, legions of whom became familiar with the term after its appearance in 1992’s bestselling Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. For the rest of us, the metaverse is a relatively new phenomenon, thrust into the public spotlight most recently and forcefully [...]
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November 18, 2021
Why the Value of CableLabs’ 10G Challenge Far Exceeds $300K
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Bravo to CableLabs for incenting a new wave of next-generation applications aimed at improving the way we live, work, learn and play. The organization’s recently launched 10G Challenge will award a total of $300,000 to innovators developing services, applications or technologies that will leverage the increased speed and [...]
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October 29, 2021
Veteran MSO Engineer offers Insights on Navigating the Journey to DOCSIS 4.0
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | “There’s still a long way to go but it’s a relatively straight-forward chain of events that we’ve been through many times,” said Tee Harton, Senior Director of OSP Engineering at Cox Communications, describing the industry’s eventual adoption of the extended spectrum version of DOCSIS 4.0 at this month’s [...]
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October 5, 2021
Welcome to the Golden Age of Broadband
By Dan Whalen, ATX President & CEO | The last 18 months have been absolutely insane with the COVID and supply pandemics, and it had been a while since I came up for air. And a thought dawned on me: With everything going on, have we overlooked how much the broadband industry has impacted the [...]
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August 23, 2021
Why Cable Operators are in ‘Good Hands’ with DOCSIS
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Recent news cycles have been dedicated to the debate over whether cable operators should continue investment in their HFC networks or instead ditch their DOCSIS® ambitions in favor of some flavor of Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) technology. Any declaration of support for either approach, like this one, is treated as [...]
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