While 10G is cable's future, better upstream speeds are its present

As a whole, the cable industry's upstream held up well during the Covid-19 pandemic, but with the increased use of video conferencing and other tools associated with work-from-home and online learning, cable operators need to accelerate their efforts on expanding the upstream according to CommScope CTO Tom Cloonan. "In the upstream, we've seen that it's grown by about 25% over what it was in February," Cloonan said. "So that's a big jump. That's just a massive, sudden, big jump that nobody had anticipated." Overall, most cable operators were able to adjust their configurations, node splits, and node segmentations during the March-to-April timeframe, but Cloonan said Covid-19 accelerated their plans to do mid-splits at 85MHz and high-splits to 204MHz for their upstreams. Currently, most cable operators have a return band of 5 MHz to 42 MHz on the upstream.