Is Cable Broadband Equal to Fiber?

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said of a cable broadband comparison to fiber: "The idea that this technology [fiber] is transformative and superior is just dead wrong. It’s just another form of transmission.” There are mountains of facts that say that Rutledge is wrong. First, Charter is expanding its network around the country either through self-funding to reach areas just outside of the traditional cable territories, or by pursuing grants and subsidies, such as with the $1.2 billion that Charter claimed in the 2020 RDOF reverse auction. It looks like Charter is building fiber to all of these new locations. Other big cable companies are doing the same. Second, the vast majority of complaints that cable broadband customers had during the pandemic can be pinned on the slow upload speeds delivered on the technology. The third issue is jitter. This is the variance in the broadband signal. The broadband signal on many coaxial networks spikes wildly up and down. Jitter is what kicks people off Zoom calls when they have enough bandwidth – the bandwidth temporarily drops and is not enough to sustain the Zoom connection. Fiber networks have comparatively tiny jitter, with most of the jitter coming from the open Internet and not from the local fiber network.