begun in earnest now that the industry has coalesced behind the spec.
Markets Day presentation in February. With its fibre business also on fire, T-Mobile projects that its combined FWA and fibre networks will pass more than 50 million homes and rake in up to 19 million customers by 2030. Then there’s the BEAD factor. BEAD (which stands for Broadband Equity, Access, & Deployment) is a U.S. programme aimed at boosting broadband deployment throughout the nation with $42.5 billion in federal government subsidies. Revised by the Trump administration to make it more technology-neutral, it should shell out billions of dollars to spur new fibre, FWA and satellite networks, starting later this year. “There are a lot of new players (vying for) BEAD dollars,” Lenderman said. “It shook up our forecasts a little bit.” Given all these market trends, things don’t look promising for cable broadband in North America currently. Yet all hope is not lost. That’s because while fibre and FWA continue to chalk up impressive gains, HFC and DOCSIS are still far from finished. Indeed, multiple senior cable technologists and analysts insist that HFC and DOCSIS still have at least a decade of life left in them. So don’t start planning coax’s funeral just yet. “My crystal ball has a lot of cracks in it so I don’t want to venture a guess,” said Guy Sucharczuk, CEO of Aurora Networks. “(But) I think we have a long way to go.” There are several good reasons why. For one thing, many cablecos are now deploying either DOCSIS 3.1 or the enhanced DOCSIS 3.1 Plus version, as well as related plant and spectrum upgrades. These moves have enabled operators to boost broadband downstream speeds to multi-gigabit levels and upstream speeds to 1Gbps or more, making them more competitive with fibre providers offering symmetrical multi-gig speeds. “DOCSIS 3.1 Plus gives you really healthy speeds,” said Asaf Matatiyau, senior vice president of product for the broadband business at Harmonic, noting that the spec enables downstream speeds up to 8.5Gbps and upstream speeds as high as 1.5Gbps. “We definitely see a different metric with multi-gig service.” For another, after years of trials and tribulations, cable’s long-awaited rollout of DOCSIS 4.0 technology has finally
“I think it will be a big year for DOCSIS 4.0 deployments,” said Hanno Narjus, senior fellow at Teleste. “Every customer we’re engaged with has some DOCSIS 4.0 activity.” As might be expected, the two North American cable giants, Comcast and Charter, are leading the charge to D4.0, which enables data speeds as high as 10Gbps downstream and 6Gbps upstream. At the latest count, Comcast has deployed its preferred flavour of DOCSIS 4.0, Full Duplex (FDX), to “millions” of homes across its vast U.S. footprint, up from about 1 million homes passed in 10 markets two years ago, according to Elad Nafshi, the cableco’s executive vice president and chief network officer. Speaking at Light Reading’s Cable Next-Gen Technologies and Strategies conference in Denver in late March, Nafshi said Comcast has also installed roughly 300,000 FDX amplifiers and 225,000 digital nodes to support its D4 rollouts. In addition, Comcast has upgraded about 60% of its HFC footprint for “mid-splits, which boost upstream capacity, and has adopted a virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS). The cableco expects to complete similar upgrades across most of its footprint this year. For its part, Charter is now deploying the other D4 variant, Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD). Its multi-phase plan calls for upgrading 50% of its network to symmetrical, multi-gig service by the end of this year and the other half in 2027. Charter has also pledged to accelerate DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades in the territories it will inherit when it takes over Cox Communications later this year. Other U.S. and Canadian MSOs are rolling out DOCSIS 4.0 too. Take Rogers Communications. Rogers, the largest cableco in Canada, plans to deploy DOCSIS 4.0 “aggressively” in areas without FTTH lines. Or take Mediacom Communications. The midsized U.S. operator, which started deploying D4.0 last year, recently signed up its first customers for the new spec. “We’re vey bullish on 4.0,” said J.R. Walden, CTO and senior vice president of Mediacom, speaking on a forum hosted
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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