By Tom Cloonan, Ayham Al-Banna, Frank O’Keeffe & John Ulm, CommScope; Ruth Cloonan, BlueOpus
Since their inception, Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) networks have long been an evolving and changing infrastructure, continually adding new incremental changes in technology and delivering ever-increasing Bandwidth Capacities to accommodate the needs of their various services (Video, High Speed Data (HSD), and Voice). MSOs have long recognized that the HFC plant contains vast quantities of un-tapped Bandwidth Capacity, which can usually be enabled in a gradual, cost-effective, “just-in-time” fashion using minor evolutionary transitions applied intelligently to selected piece-parts of the network. This relatively low-cost, evolutionary approach to network transition has been quite successful and is usually preferred over more expensive revolutionary changes (ex: switching to FTTH) that attempt to change (or replace) a large amount of the HFC plant equipment and head-end equipment and in-home equipment all at once.