[walrus01]

> This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I know, and you know, that the people doing the more serious engineering for DOCSIS based cable last mile segments are well aware of the limitations of the tech. What I was saying is that they are milking every last dollar of ROI out of the existing physical plant because overbuilding your entire network with XGSPON (it would be dumb to do 2.5G PON in 2024/2025) is a very capital intensive endeavour.

The shareholder value and profits of the company are increased in the short term by continuing to do copper as long as possible, even at the cost of thousands of unhappy customers dragging your company's name into the mud.

It's the fundamental business model problem, and executives at big dinosaur coax operator telecoms that have made the decision to do it this way as long as possible, until the coax/oversubcription situation becomes completely untenable in an area, or until a real XGSPON operator (maybe Lumen, or Ziply, or similar) which overlaps with your historical cable tv network rolls out a better product and you have no choice but to spend the money to keep up with the local competition.

You and I also know that no matter how much they mess about with DOCSIS3.1 and channel sizes and different RF configurations, the aggregate capacity of a few strands of fiber (using even the lowest cost and most rudimentary WDM) is much greater than RF over coax. Squeezing 2048/4096QAM RF stuff into coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. It's not a viable long term solution!