By Ayham Al-Banna, Ph.D. & Tom Cloonan, Ph.D., CommScope
The plethora of new technologies and alternatives has made the task of HFC network migration more challenging than ever! The MSOs are faced with difficult decisions as their strategy executives and HFC network architects try to navigate the future of their HFC networks. The difficulty comes from identifying potential market challenges and addressing those challenges using the right technology in a timely and cost-effective manner.
DOCSIS 4.0 offers various technologies that will enable the delivery of 10 Gbps DS peak rates and 5Gbps US peak rates. Utilizing the right technology at the right time will be instrumental for the success of the MSOs. This paper attempts to provide the list of available tools in the network migration toolkit and proposes a time-aware methodology for using these tools to yield a cost-effective migration strategy that meets customers traffic demand and addresses competition.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the latest traffic engineering trends and potential COVID-19 impact. Various network migration tools are described in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the decision interactions between some of the migration tools like traditional FDD, FDX & dynamic softFDD, and ESD. Time-aware decision process is discussed in Section 5. Section 6 provides an example migration strategy that uses various migration tools. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 7.