Blog
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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August 3, 2021
Are Cable Operators as Concerned About FTTH Providers as They Should be?
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | At the beginning of 2021, we asked a universe of roughly 100 cable industry professionals who took the ATX HFC network evolution survey to express their concern level over the long-term competitive threat posed by Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) broadband providers. Nearly 45% of survey takers considered the challenge from [...]
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July 13, 2021
Catching up with SCTE 1.8GHz Actives Working Group Co-author Mike Whitley
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Standards are essential to the cable industry. Without them, innovation slows and the cost of building out networks capable of delivering world-class speed and bandwidth to millions of subscribers soars. Not surprisingly, standards development is a significant contributor to the cable industry’s longtime success in delivering unmatched broadband [...]
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June 25, 2021
Cable Operators Weigh Upstream Bandwidth Expansion Options
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Surfing the Internet has long been a heavily asymmetrical activity, with end users receiving magnitudes more data than they send back toward the headend. But the disproportion between downstream and return-path traffic payloads is beginning to dissipate. Increases in the sophistication of online gaming, an uptick in the [...]
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