Unified Chipsets Opening Door to Increased DOCSIS 4.0 Deployments

Cable operators moving to 10G won't max out their legacy hybrid fiber coaxial networks, as they have 15 to 20 years of capacity growth in them, Vecima Chief Technology Officer Colin Howlett said Thursday during an SCTE webinar. In addition, Howlett said cable operators will make a variety of DOCSIS 4.0 announcements in 2025, complementing the Comcast/Charter Communications/Broadcom announcement in September that they're collaborating on a unified DOCSIS chipset for such equipment as modems and nodes. A lot of cable operators that were planning DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades instead may reevaluate those plans and go with the DOCSIS 4.0 specification, enabled by those chipsets, he said.