By Phil Miguelez, Comcast
The broadband landscape is rapidly changing driven by market competition from non-traditional providers, a resurgence in new home construction, and a vast array of new services to support the connected home environment. Traditional node splitting is not enough to keep up with bandwidth demands and high speed data rate comparisons to predatory fiber to the premise over-builders. The decisions that cable operators must make to meet these challenges include options that affect every part of the infrastructure network: facilities, OSP, fiber augmentation, and plant powering. Capacity planning which barely existed just a few years ago is now the major focus of every MSO. This paper will compare and contrast the different network architecture options that are available today and developing network technology that will be ready to deploy in the very near future – DOCSIS 3.1 with RF bandwidth expansion, Fiber Deep cascade reduction, FTTH, and R-Phy / R-MacPhy distributed architectures. The paper will also explore the relative cost implications of each architecture design and the capability to migrate to the next generation as data capacity demands continue to grow and accelerate.