Jeff Baumgarner of Light Reading wrote an article detailing increased spending by cable companies as they continue to upgrade networks. The article notes a 40% increase in spending for the deployment of distributed access architecture (DAA).

Distributed Access Architecture is a network architecture that decentralizes cable networks by moving some of the brains and related functions to neighborhood nodes. Historically, cable company networks packed all of the network electronics at a centralized headend. There are significant benefits of moving broadband equipment into neighborhoods. The DAA upgrade is often accompanied by reducing the dnumber of customers on each neighborhood node, which alone increases the bandwidth distributed to the remaining customers. The upgrade to DAA generally means more overall bandwidth when cable companies upgrade to 10-gigabit bandwidth to feed each DAA node. In many cases, the transport reaching nodes still uses analog technology, and upgrading to a digital DAA improves bandwidth efficiency. Customers benefit from improved latency due to being closer to the core.

Part of the reason for the 2026 spending is that cable companies put network expansion plans on hold in 2025, waiting for the release of new Broadcom chips that enable the network to be expanded to 1.8 GHz of bandwidth. This higher bandwidth is enabling cable companies to significantly increase customer upload speeds by upgrading to symmetrical bandwidth with DOCSIS 4.0 or by using upgrades referred to as mid-splits to increase upload speeds on DOCSIS 3.1.

A lot of upgrades to DAA are restructuring cable networks for the future by using remote physical layer architecture (R-PHY) to move the modulation and demodulation functions to the neighborhood node. Remote MAC-PHY relocates both the PHY layer and the processing MAC layer to the node. This new configuration means the only thing left at headends are servers, switches, and routers, and opens the possibility of doing away with much of the headend and migrating the switching function to a regional data center.

Baumgartner notes other upgrades being made by cable companies. He notes that cable companies are integrating PON fiber technology into the network to serve new growth and rural markets. He quotes Jeff Heynen or Dell’Oro saying that sales of PON nodes to cable companies are up 71% year-over-year.

Baumgartner also provides some updates on DOCSIS 4.0 deployments. He says that Comcast is still leading the charge on DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades and has already upgraded millions of premises. He says Charter has plans to upgrade 35% of its footprint to DOCSIS 4.0 over the next few years and that it plans to accelerate the upgrades when it completes the merger with Cox. He also notes that Mediacom Communications is deploying D4.0 in some markets.

The one downside for vendors is that cable company spending on customer CPE is down 5% this year, probably reflecting the continuing loss of customers by every big cable company.

The reason for these upgrades is clear – customers still have more trust in fiber than in cable company HFC technology. PC Magazine recently conducted a nationwide survey that ranked customer satisfaction with ISPs. NextLight, a municipal network in Longmont, Colorado, got the highest rating of 9.7, followed close behind by GFiber at 9.4. The other big fiber ISPs ranged between 7.8 for Frontier to 8.3 for AT&T. The big cable companies ranged from 6.4 for Comcast to 6.8 for Optimum.