White Papers

Charting the HFC Evolution

The fourth and most recent edition of the 2050 Project Survey Report reflects the opinions of nearly 150 cable professionals, the biggest universe of participants in the survey’s history. This year’s report, similar to previous editions, contains more than 30 charts that document how MSO attitudes and deployment plans have changed from just a year ago – and previous years.

Will extensions to DOCSIS 3.1 impact the DOCSIS 4.0 deployment timeline? What’s the interest level in a unified version of DOCSIS 4.0? How much will MSOs pay to add intelligence into HFC actives? These and other questions are answered and analyzed in the recently available report.

A major finding from this year’s survey is that even though MSOs may be evaluating or recalculating the nature and pace of their network upgrades, most remain dedicated to evolving their HFC networks to support multigigabit symmetrical services.

Key Report Findings:

• More than 35% of respondents categorize the threat from FTTH competitors as Significant, an increase of 16% over the previous year.
• Nearly half of all participants (42%) indicated that the availability of DOCSIS 3.1 Extended was prompting them to revisit DOCSIS 4.0 deployment decisions and timelines.
• Just 6% of survey takers identified Safety concerns as a top priority when evaluating energy storage options for their standby power operations.
• At 36%, Reliability was selected as the most important attribute, beyond speed and capacity, that would impact consumers’ selection of a broadband service.