Blog
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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June 2, 2021
How to Capitalize on Commercial Video’s Post-COVID Comeback
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Much has been made — and rightfully celebrated — about the way broadband service providers were able to accommodate the surge of traffic, especially in the upstream, resulting from the COVID-related relocation of the workforce in the spring of 2020. Unlike so many other industries negatively impacted by [...]
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May 25, 2021
Why I’m a Proud Follower of the Cult of Coax
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | I got nothing against fiber. As far as broadband media goes, fiber’s got a lot going for it. That’s why it’s the go-to choice among broadband service providers, including cable operators, for extending their services to new areas and regions. Nobody is knocking fiber. But I must admit [...]
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May 12, 2021
Why Your HFC Evolution Strategy Requires Frequent Refreshing
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | Most cable technologists and engineers tend to think and plan in increments of about five years or so. And for good reason: technology evolves at such a rapid rate that today’s cutting-edge equipment, and the adoption assumptions it is based on, could be outdated, or even obsolete, within [...]
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May 5, 2021
Why the Time to Futureproof your Network is Now
By Dan Whalen, ATX President & CEO | Regrettable spend, roughly defined as technology investments with short lifespans or absorbing unnecessary operational costs to retread the same ground, keeps cable execs and engineers up at night as much as anything else. Some potential bad news for cable operators is that they may be losing more [...]
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March 24, 2021
How will the Post-COVID Workforce Impact HFC Network Evolution?
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | With COVID restrictions beginning to ease and the potential for a majority of the adult population to be vaccinated sometime this summer, businesses and social observers are starting to contemplate what the workplace might look like in the not-to-distant future. The question of whether workers flock back to [...]
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March 4, 2021
The Digital Divide is Wider (and Deeper) than you Think
By Joe McGarvey, Senior Director, Marketing | The Digital Divide and efforts to overcome the disparity in broadband services available to urban and rural communities through government subsidies have been much in the news recently. Just a few weeks ago, ATX’s CEO Dan Whalen penned a blog post highlighting the importance of the Rural Digital [...]
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