FROM THE INDUSTRY
Frontier Spirit Tell me more about the North American landscape. In North America there’s massive investment going into upgrading cable networks. The focus is on improving upstream capacity and moving towards symmetrical speeds. Downstream has always been strong but upstream lagged behind. Now, with technologies like high-split or ultra high split and DOCSIS 4.0, operators can deliver multi-gigabit upstream as well. That’s a big deal. Driving demand for new equipment presumably? Huge demand. We’re talking millions of amplifiers and tens of millions of multitaps being replaced or upgraded. It’s a massive market. Our US business is doing very well as a result. There’s often this narrative of fibre versus cable, as if one has to win. This sounds more like coexistence. That’s exactly right. It’s not a binary choice. In many cases, operators are running hybrid strategies; maintaining cable where it makes sense and deploying fibre where it adds value. In Mexico we’ve been working on a large deployment there where a cable operator is overlaying fibre onto their existing network. It’s driven by competition, as they need to upgrade, but they’re doing it in a way that leverages what they already have.
How’s it going there? We’ve delivered enough equipment for 2.5m homes and delivering more orders in this year. With this customer, we’ve developed a really good use case: they’re a cable operator migrating to fibre. Force of competition and a mandate to upgrade is behind this migration. We’re doing the largest deployment of remote optical line terminals in the world. We’re supplying our rOLT solution; it’s very small can be fitted without fuss. Unlike big, bulky central office type technology, which is in racks, requires permission to install, a lot of power and needs cooling, our solution can be installed at night in apartment blocks, with minimum disruption.
No wonder it’s taking off.
Plus, while it looks like they’re doing a cable equipment network upgrade, they’re actually overlaying fibre. We are able to do up to about 750 homes using 60 watts – the power demand of a light bulb.We’re using SFP technology, so you just put in more ports as you need capacity. In the summer we’re launching a version which is double that capacity; up to 1,200 homes from one of these little boxes. We’ve effectively developed an alternative solution to DOCSIS 4.0. That works as an option in high labour cost countries like Northern Europe, North America, where the infrastructure is already set up to accommodate the technology and the higher service fees. However, in Mexico where its labour costs much less, they can afford to do fibre. We’re doing GPON there, and then we’re doing rollout of combo PON, which is XGS-PON and GPON.
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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