SCTE PRESENTS
broadband services has been increasing. In May 2025, for the first time in the United States, viewing on streaming services overtook that of cable and broadcast TV. Since Nielsen started tracking usage in 2021, broadcast was down 21% and cable 39%, while streaming has grown around 71%. “The more loading, the closer you get to congestion, and you then have to start to think about segmentation.” Quality of Experience Despite the increased use of prioritisation, 47% of US subscribers have cancelled a subscription due to buffering, according to Bitmovin figures quoted by Hamid El Gharbaoui, operations manager, UK & Nordics, Witbe. El Gharbaoui said the dozens of platforms that are now available internationally were creating even higher user expectations. “The result of that is a massive operational challenge where every bug increases churn. Studies show that every second of delay increases the likelihood of abandonment; with the number of offers available to consumers now, people stop complaining, they just leave.”
don’t think we have in quite the same way here, but certainly it gives more flexibility now to operators to prioritise their own services. Whether that’s good or bad I think remains to be seen.” DOCSIS 4.0 is now available to all operators, whereas only a year ago, this was restricted to those who had a developer agreement with Broadcom. Even the small city carriers are acknowledging that DOCSIS 4.0 is important to them. The real threat is coming from wireless broadband. Just as homes ‘cut the cord’ for their TV, so too wired broadband is coming under pressure. Verizon and T-Mobile are already successfully building a FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) business in the US. Meanwhile, President Trump has revised rules established during the Biden administration for distributing $42.5 billion in funding for rural broadband funding. This eases the restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink and other satellite-based providers.
Whitehead said operators were “Stepping away from speed wins” and instead were concentrating on improving the quality of service and this represents a big part of Comcast’s messaging. The US operator has over 6 million homes on its Ultra Low Latency deployment. “On a loaded network they see the packets”, he explains. “If you’re playing a gaming service, watching a streaming service, it means you’re not being taken out because of poor latency.” ‘The Comcast service today has three different application service providers that are marking their packets and that’s limiting in some ways,” says Whitehead. “One of the things we showed at ANGA COM in Cologne is the solution from a company called Cujo, who have an application that runs on a gateway and they have an increasing list of applications, so an operator deploying that technology in their home gateways can start to pick and choose the applications that they want to prioritise through the network.” Such prioritisation brings up the issue of network neutrality, but Whitehead doesn’t believe it’s the issue it once was. “It gives more of an opportunity to differentiate that I
As streaming services take over from traditional broadcast TV, the load on
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SEPTEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.3
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