Light Reading recently held a conference on cable commercial services, and the upshot is that cable has gotten serious on the business front. According to Jeff Baumgartner, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox have all joined the $1B club, with at least one billion dollars of revenue in commercial services.
The consensus for the future is that the cable industry will move forward with EPON rather than GPON for all-fiber networks designed to be marketed to businesses. This is not just a contrarian move in response to Verizon’s use of GPON. According to the MSO community, EPON makes sense economically, and it will offer a quicker path to 10-Gbps speeds both upstream and downstream.
Of course, cable operators aren’t going to abandon investments they’ve made elsewhere just to turn over a new EPON leaf, even with new revenue in the offing. So we’re back to discussing DPoE – DOCSIS Provisioning over EPON. Motorola’s got a hand in that game, and started talking about DPoE services back at the SCTE show in October. Will this be a big theme for 2011? Yes or no, it’s clear that after years of talking the talk around commercial services, the cable community is ready to walk the walk.
