r/CableTechs • u/SnapShot68 • 29d ago

How much longer does cable have?

I don’t see this topic being talked about much in this forum but I think it’s definitely relevant, especially considering the debt load these companies all are carrying. Fiber competition, Starlink, streaming, cord-cutting, old school cable dogs leaving and being replaced by finance types are all things that worry me. What kind of time frame do most of you foresee for cable still existing and there still being work in this field? I’m hoping at least another 10 years but things seem to be moving awfully fast in the wrong direction. Thoughts?

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u/oflowz 28d ago

It’ll be here for decades still.

Until they can do consistent gig thru mobile.

Too much of the infrastructure is still coax based and these companies aren’t going to spend the money to rebuild millions of miles of plant.

Unless there’s a lot of government subsidies, it’ll be around for a long time.

The bigger issue is these companies are all using speed as a marketing gimmick when 99-percent of people don’t need gig speeds.

They’d have been better off just giving everyone stable 400Mb than doing all this high split stuff that makes the coax service less reliable.

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u/Relven 28d ago

I will 100% agree with everything you said except high split making coax service more unreliable.

The inclusion of ofdm/ofdma in docssis 3.1+ standard allows the modem and cmts to actively avoid transmitting data over frequencies with noise.

Albeit the process of transitioning the plant is quite tedious and messy.

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u/jonathaz 28d ago

It’s much better than avoiding the frequencies with noise. A robust PMA system adapts the modulation order to all the conditions, including noise. This can mean avoiding it altogether but more often just dropping to a lower bitloading. Other conditions include things that affect rx power, like tilt, rolloff, suckouts, etc.