A Disturbing View of Future Cable Broadband

Sean McDevitt, a partner at Arthur D. Little, a consulting firm that largely works for the giant ISPs, says cable companies are not likely to universally upgrade broadband networks in the future. In the past, when a cable company migrated from DOCSIS 1.0, to 2.0, and to 3.0 everybody in a community was upgraded to the latest technology. He says going forward that it’s almost certain that there will not be across-the-board upgrades. He says there will be neighborhoods upgraded to fiber, neighborhoods migrated to the next-generation DOCSIS 4.0, and neighborhoods that will see no upgrades at all. I label this as disturbing because it raises the possibility of digital redlining in communities if cable companies start upgrading selectively. The upgrades to fiber or DOCSIS 4.0 will bring faster upload speeds to match fast download speeds. Any neighborhood left on the current DOCSIS 3.1 platform will be stuck with inadequate upload speeds, which was the predominant problem with cable broadband during the pandemic and continues to be a problem for the millions who want to work from home. It will be ironic if a decade from now, we’ll be talking about digital redlining from the cable companies while the telcos will have upgraded to symmetrical fiber. That would be a complete reversal of past history.