Impact of bandwidth demand growth on HFC networks

Abstract

Cable Multiple Service Operators (MSOs) are facing increasing bandwidth demands for supporting more High Definition (HD) programs as well as from new and growing applications of High Speed Internet Access (HSIA). Deployments of fiber to the home (FTTH) or fiber to the node with DSL (FTTN/DSL) in some telecom networks are raising the question of whether the MSO's Hybrid Fiber/Coax (HFC) architecture can meet the future demands. This presentation will look at the present and future demands for bandwidth from various services and evaluate the ability of the HFC architecture to meet these demands. We describe the different incremental steps that an MSO can take to increase the available bandwidth and compare the resulting network's capacity to the future bandwidth need. Finally we briefly compare the ability of the FTTH and FTTN/DSL networks to meet the same future demand.