Category Archives: Technology

Technology Shorts October 2026

Today’s blog looks at some technology breakthroughs that may have long-term impact on the broadband industry.

First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip. IBM announced a new chip in June that packs almost 100 billion transistors in a chip the size of a fingernail. IBM’s new chip is a landmark moment in computing and pushes transistor technology beyond the nanometer era to the scale of atoms. The new chip features a transistor architecture of 0.7 nanometers (or 7 angstroms). The company says the new chip, with dimensions of 10 millimeters by 15 millimeters is 70% more energy efficient, and has a 50% improvement in performance over the industry’s best current chips. The company predicts the new chip technology will become standard in commercial devices within a decade.

To create the new chip, IBM researchers developed an entirely new transistor architecture they call the nanostack. The nanostack design vertically stacks and staggers transistors, taking advantage of 3D sequential integration to pack more transistors onto a chip. The design also unlocks the use of different material combinations within each stacked layer, optimizing performance and power efficiency of each transistor independent of the other.

New Record Fiber Speed. Researchers at University College London (UCL) set a new fiber optics record by transmitting a signal at 450 terabits per second. The work was carried out in partnership with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. The team sent a data transmission from the UCL Roberts Building in Bloomsbury, London, to the Telehouse North data center near Canary Wharf in London, and back for a round-trip distance of 24 miles.

The fast speed was accomplished by expanding the light frequencies being used. Fiber optics technology uses the C-Band of infrared light between 1530 and 1565 nanometers, and the L-Band between 1565 and 1625 nanometers. These two bands contain 134 and 163 potential separate channels, respectively.

The researchers used additional frequency bands of data transmission to include O-Band (1260 to 1360 nm), the E-Band (1360 to 1460 nm), and the S-Band (1460 to 1530 nm). This added over 1,000 additional light channels.

Light-Powered Chip. Scientists at Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy, in Melbourne, Australia, have created a tiny new circuit for use in quantum computing that can generate, direct, and read information carried by light, all within a single chip. The teams findings, led by Dr. Chi Li, were published in Nature Photonics. The new device relies on ultra-thin materials that are only a few atoms thick. The materials are paired with specially engineered nanostructures designed to precisely control light at extremely small scales. One of the most important aspects of the technology is that it operates at room temperature, while most quantum systems require extremely cold environments.

This new chip is a milestone in the growing area of research known as “valleytronics”. The new chip produces specialized light signals and steers the light along specific paths before converting to electrical signals. The light signals store information using a quantum property called the “valley degree of freedom.” Scientists believe the unique characteristic of the system could provide entirely new ways to encode, transmit, and process data. It could be the basis for breakthroughs in faster computing and lower energy consumption.

WiFi Identification. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute of Information Security and Dependability have been able to use the signals from a standard WiFi router to identify people and map their surroundings without relying on cameras or requiring the person being observed to carry a connected device. They’ve found a way to observe the propagation of radio waves to create an image of objects in the environment, basically using radio waves in the same way that a camera uses light waves.

Earlier approaches to sensing people through wireless signals relied on specialized equipment and complex measurements involving reflected signals. The new technique does not require any specialized hardware and works with off-the-shelf WiFi. The researchers were instantly alarmed at the potential misuse of the technology by unscrupulous corporations or authoritarian governments. They are calling for protective measures and privacy safeguards to be incorporated into the forthcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard.

The WiFi Dilemma

A recent article in Telecompetitor describes a new white paper from Parks Associates and TechSee that reports that broadband customers with poor WiFi are six times more likely to say that they will change ISP. This finding documents something that all ISPs know and is what I call the WiFi dilemma. ISPs can deliver great bandwidth to the home, but customers judge them by the performance inside the home.

The report is based on 8,000 surveys of Internet households that were conducted in late 2025. The results are stated in terms of the net promoter score (NPS), which is a standard used in many industries that is based on the degree to which customers would give a good rating of a company to their friends and neighbors.

The results of the survey are sobering for any ISP. Customers who have WiFi dead spots in their home had an NPS of -17. Customers with slow perceived download speeds had an NPS of -19. Customers who had a negative customer service experience had an NPS of -19. Customers who had all three problems had an NPS of -28.

To put those numbers into perspective, the average broadband customer without any of these problems had an NPS of +22. That’s a big difference compared to customers with problems, because a positive NPS means a customer has an overall positive opinion of an ISP, while a negative NPS means they don’t. Most importantly, 43% of customers with all three problems said they were likely to change ISPS, while only 7% of customers without these problems were thinking of changing ISPs. I wrote a blog recently that talked about how poor economics had increased churn rates across the country. But poor broadband performance has always been a major cause of churn.

Why did the blog header call this a WiFi dilemma? If an ISP requires customers to use its WiFi router, then any WiFi issues inside the home are going to be completely blamed on the ISP. If ISPs allow customers to bring their own WiFi routers, ISPs are still going to be blamed when those routers are out of date or configured poorly.

ISPs face myriad WiFi issues with customers. A lot of houses need WiFi extenders or a mesh network to reach all parts of the home, and a lot of ISPs don’t help customers go through the painstaking process of placing extenders in the optimum locations. Even when an ISP helps a customer set up a WiFi mesh network to work well, customers change things to disrupt the WiFi. One of my favorite stories is from a technician who visited a home complaining about poor bandwidth, only to find that the homeowner had put the router behind a heavy metal file cabinet.

Customers often have WiFi problems that are related to the performance of the devices like TVs or computers that are connected to the WiFi. Customers don’t understand how the WiFi signal weakens with distance and from passing through walls and are unhappy when speeds are slower at the far ends of the house from the WiFi router. Technicians get frustrated when they find customers using WiFi routers that are several generations old – that might have been bought at a yard sale.

The dilemma ISPs face is how much effort to put into keeping customers happy with poor WiFi. Truck rolls are expensive and can’t solve some of the issues. Helping customers remotely to solve WiFi issues is time-consuming and can be frustrating for both parties.

Unfortunately, many ISPs have trained customers that speeds matter more than performance, so these issues are likely to get worse as WiFi routers get older and customer expectations grow higher. I know a lot of ISPs who deal with this issue well, through dedicating technician time to keep customers happy, but many ISPs have decided they can’t afford that effort.

A New Broadband Competitor

In 2025, Edgebeam Wireless was formed to take advantage of the unused spectrum of TV stations. The business is a partnership between the E.W. Scripps Company, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair. You may recall that a few years ago the FCC held an incentive auction to lure TV stations to sell their spectrum, and many station owners decided to do so. However, many TV stations, including these companies retained the spectrum because they perceived that the value in using the spectrum was greater than the value of selling it.

EdgeBeam is currently actively expanding the business. In April 2026, the company acquired Sinclair’s Broadspan distribution platform (including its software suite and core engineering team). In mid-April 2026, EdgeBeam onboarded Soracom as its first cellular partner to allow the business to bundle mobile and broadband services.

Edgebeam is using ATSC 3.0 technology. ATSC 3.0 is a technology upgrade for broadcast TV stations that overlays a broadband signal on top of an over-the-air TV transmission signal. When this technology was first introduced, stations talked about using it to provide reliable 4K video through the air, allow for video-on-demand, provide immersive high-quality audio, and greatly improve the broadcast emergency alert system. TV stations also envisioned a whole array of digital features that are standard with streaming services, like program guides, actor bios, and any other kind of added information a station wants to send to customers.

Edgebeam is going far beyond the vision of better television and wants to use the bandwidth to provide services to commercial and industrial users. The company has one big advantage since its owners have stations in most urban markets, giving the company access to a huge number of potential connections.

The company is targeting the following markets:

  • Automotive connectivity and the ability to push large updates to cars for maps, infotainment, precision navigation, and safety enhancements.
  • Providing a new connection for public safety networks, which have been shown to get quickly overwhelmed during emergencies.
  • Digital signage to support video billboards.
  • IoT and content delivery networks (CDNs) where Edgebeam would offload large local data files in edge networks.
  • Improving the accuracy of GPS by being terrestrially-based instead of satellite-based.
  • Automatic updates to firmware for ASC 3.0-enabled devices.

The company has already landed a large customer in the Digital Mapping Group. DMG is using the Edgebeam bandwidth to provide local precision mapping within a centimeter for construction and utility projects.

The real benefit of ASC 3.0 technology is that Edgebeam can send data to any device that has a built-in ASC 3.0-capable chip. The technology is already being deployed in smart TVs, giving the chipmaker the economy of scale needed to keep costs low. This is a more cost-effective way than enabling devices for 5G. Edgebeam is also using licensed spectrum that isn’t being used for other purposes.

The bandwidth isn’t large, and a single ASC 3.0 signal can realistically deliver speeds of 25 – 50 Mbps. However, when coupled with the H.265 video codec, the bandwidth can be used to deliver large files like 4K video. Since most of the planned uses of Edgebeam plan to transmit data in the background, that’s sufficient bandwidth for a slew of use cases. The company is clearly a new competitor to 5G. Interestingly, most of the Edgebeam markets are the same benefits cell carriers claimed for 5G – and largely didn’t fulfill. If Edgebeam is successful, it is going to make it that much harder to justify big outlays for 6G.

LoRa – The Quiet Radio Technology

LoRa is a radio technology in common use that most people have never hear about. The LoRa Alliance recently reported that there are 150 million global devices connected by LoRa technology. LoRa is shorthand for Long Range and is a radio technology that sends small bits of data over long distances using little battery power. In the U.S., the LoRa technology uses unlicensed spectrum between 902 and 928 MHz.

There is a good chance that you are close to a device using the technology. Here are some of the common uses for LoRa:

  • Smart metering for water, gas, and electric meters.
  • Smart parking to indicate if parking spots are empty or occupied.
  • Smart city applications like reading sensors for air quality, weather, gunshot detectors, or full trash cans.
  • Disaster warning such as flood water level sensors or air quality smoke sensors that indicate a fire.
  • Industrial monitoring for a wide variety of sensors to monitor things like machine vibrations, structural cracks, or changes in temperature
  • Tracking large assets like forklifts
  • The open-source app Meshtastic is being used to text locally without using the telco grid, which is particularly useful for hikers and others traveling where there is no cell service.
  • Panic buttons for health or safety alerts.

LoRa is a relatively new technology. The idea was developed in France by Nicolas Sornin and Olivier Seller, who were looking for a cheap way to read utility meters. They worked with partners and launched the French company Cycleo in 2010, aimed at reading wireless utility meters. The company was purchased by the semiconductor company Semtech in 2012, which provided the capital to scale the technology globally. In 2015, Semtech and other interested users of the technology formed the LoRa Alliance to create and maintain open standards, to promote interoperability, and to promote the technology worldwide.  The technology took off in 2017 as carriers began shutting down legacy 2G networks.

Even though this is a low-power technology, the typical LoRa transmission is reliable for nine or ten miles. Engineers have been able to transmit a signal as far as 132 miles terrestrially using only 25 mW of power. The record for satellite-to-earth transmission is 517 miles.

LoRa uses chirp spread spectrum (CSS). This is a radio modulation technique that has been used for many years in maritime sonar, aviation, and satellite communications. CSS uses a technique to sweep upward and downward within a set frequency range over time. Each chirp can only transmit a tiny amount of data, and the technology limits the amount of data that can be sent over a given time. This makes this a great technology for transmitting simple things like the usage readings from an electric meter, or whether there is a car in a parking space.

The LoRa Alliance now has more than 340 member organizations, with 45 joining so in 2026. The Alliance has certified around 700 devices. There are some interesting large users of the technology:

  • ZENNER Connect operates more than 11.6 million sensors and over 174,000 gateways across 15 countries.
  • Netmore reports 11.2 million active devices on its network.
  • The Things Industries reports 6 million devices.
  • Veolia currently has more than 4 million active smart meters in France.
  • CENTEGIX reports more than 800,000 people wearing its CrisisAlert wearable panic button badge daily.

Using Unlicensed Spectrum for D2D

The FCC recently adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that asks if it makes sense to give satellite providers access to unlicensed WiFi spectrum to support Direct-to-Device cellular service. The NPRM specifically looks at the use of 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz. The NPRM specifically rejected the idea of using 900 MHz for satellite service.

The FCC seems all-in on the idea of satellite cellular service and has taken a number of steps recently that favor this budding industry. However, Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democratic commissioner, voiced concern about how using this spectrum might affect the many devices that rely on WiFi spectrum today.

It seems like a valid concern. WiFi has turned out to be the most important and valuable spectrum we have. The whole broadband world seems to run off WiFi modems in homes and businesses. We have outdoor WiFi hotspots to provide outdoor broadband access. WISPs largely rely on WiFi spectrum to deliver fixed wireless broadband to rural homes.

It’s easy to understand why the FCC would consider this. The agency is facing huge demand for spectrum from multiple industries. Cellular carriers want more spectrum to get ready for the upcoming introduction of 6G. Cellular carriers also need to feed the rapidly growing FWA home broadband industry. Satellite companies have an insatiable demand for spectrum since they envision eventually launching hundreds of thousands of broadband satellites. And now, the satellite cellular companies want to blanket the Earth with competing networks to deliver outdoor cellular service, and the Direct-to-Device (D2D) carriers have already requested approval to launch tens of thousands of satellites to provide outdoor cellular service. There are more requests for spectrum than what is available, so the FCC seems willing to raid the public WiFi bands to support a new industry.

This is not the first time that the FCC has allowed others to share WiFi spectrum. A number of years ago, the FCC allowed cellular carriers to use WiFi spectrum in busy markets. I recall a report from university students in Chicago who had documented that cellular usage of WiFi had killed outdoor WiFi on their campus. I don’t know if cellular companies are still dipping into WiFi now that they have been able to get more spectrum, but this was a failed effort that favored the carriers over the normal users of WiFi.

What seems to be different today is that the FCC is unabashedly pro-satellite. They seem to be giving satellite companies everything they ask for. It’s not unusual for regulators to make it easy for new technologies – the FCC took a hands-off approach to the creation of the Internet. But there seems to be a lot of risk in allowing satellite companies to broadcast WiFi from space. This idea is clearly favoring satellite carriers over WISPs.

I talked to several wireless engineers about the proposed use of WiFi spectrum, and they all voiced concerns. The satellites would blanket the countryside with new WiFi spectrum. The engineers told me that it is impossible for this to be completely neutral for a WISP. Every outdoor receiver will perceive the new use of the spectrum as interference. They said there was no way to tell how bad this might be without trying it, and that sounds like a scary experiment if it turns out that the impact is severe. It’s easy for the FCC to allow a new use of spectrum, but it’s unlikely that it would be undone quickly if there is a problem.

This is out of character for the historically slow and cautious approach that the FCC has always taken with spectrum ideas. And that’s even more the case when we’re talking about WiFi spectrum, which has proven its value many times over.

The Risk of Space Collisions

A recent article in Scientific American looked at the likelihood of collisions between satellites and other devices in orbit today and in the foreseeable future. This is becoming an increasingly important question because of the increasing number of satellites. There are currently 18,000 satellites in orbit, and 29,000 total objects, including spent rocket bodies, dead satellites, and large pieces of space debris. Goldman Sachs research says there could be as many as 305,000 satellites in orbit by 2031 and 1.7 million by 2036. Even if the actual numbers are half that, it means a huge number of orbiting objects in space.

As we put more satellites in space, the chance of collisions increases. This matters because major collisions can be disastrous, as colliding satellites break up into smaller debris that can act as orbital bullets to smash other satellites. Scientists have postulated many scenarios where some parts of space become unusable. Space debris generated at the lowest orbits can fall out of space after a few years. However, the article cites a scientist who says that debris at higher altitudes stays in orbit a lot longer. He said that at 1,200 miles above Earth, debris can persist for 100,000 years.

One prediction in the article is that there is already a 29% chance of collisions per year at altitudes between 520 and 605 kilometers since there are numerous discarded rocket stages the size of school buses at those altitudes that can’t be maneuvered to avoid a collision. The danger  of collisions at those higher orbits is that the debris will rain down and endanger all other satellites below. This might not create dead orbital zones, but it would greatly increase the risk of operating a constellation and would compel satellite operators to send excess satellites into orbit in anticipation of losing some of them.

Perhaps the biggest concern of all is the process of monitoring satellites to avoid collisions. Until recently, this process was done manually, but this now requires automated tracking of satellites to predict collisions. In the last year, Starlink says it performed 300,000 adjustments to avoid collisions, which works out to 40 maneuvers per satellite per year. Scientists worry that this will become impossible at some point as the number of satellites grows. It’s particularly worrisome since many of the counties and companies that plan to put satellites in orbit may not interface well with rival companies and countries. There’s nothing that compels them to do so.

A really scary scenario is the aftermath of a major solar storm that knocks out the electronics of many satellites. We’ve had several such solar storms just in the century we’ve been tracking solar events. A satellite that is disabled by a solar storm would become a dead object that would not be able to maneuver to avoid collisions. The article cites an expert who predicts that a killer solar storm would lead to major satellite collisions within days.

The biggest concern of all for me is that nobody is governing satellite traffic safety. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Switzerland, which is part of the United Nations, approves worldwide spectrum for satellites and loosely coordinates assigned orbital slots. However, the ITU doesn’t consider the capacity of a given orbit to handle satellites as part of its review process. With dozens of countries planning to launch satellites, space is becoming the Wild West. It might take a major event to get the world interested in doing the hard work needed to make this work.

Wooden versus Metal Poles

I recently saw a question on LinkedIn that asked why we don’t use more metal utility poles instead of wooden ones. It’s a good question, and there are a lot of issues to consider when choosing between the two.

One issue to consider is useful life. On paper, the useful life of a wooden pole is thirty to forty years. However, there are plenty of poles that have lasted fifty and even sixty years. The local conditions have a lot to do with pole life. Problems like rotting wood, constant moisture, fungi, and woodpeckers can lower the useful life of a wooden pole. Steel utility poles are expected to last fifty to sixty years and can last up to eighty years. The main problem that can shorten the life of metal poles is salt and high humidity in the environment.

Another important issue is cost. Wooden poles have gotten a lot more expensive in recent years. I see prices online today between $250 and $1,300 for a 40-foot pole, with the price varying by thickness and load-bearing ability. Steel poles are more expensive, with a typical price for a 40-foot pole between $2,000 and $3,000. It’s cheaper to ship wooden poles since they weigh less than steel poles of the same height. Installation costs are generally less for wooden poles. Construction contractors and utilities already have the equipment and experience to install them. In most applications, wooden poles can be directly buried in the ground. Steel poles routinely need a foundation, which adds time and cost to the installation process. From a pure cost/benefit perspective, when looking at the combination of the initial cost versus the life, wooden poles have a lower cost per year than steel poles.

But there are other factors to consider. For example, wooden poles need to be inspected more often during their lifetime. One interesting issue to consider is that many poles don’t make it to the end of their useful life. Some are destroyed by storms or by vehicle accidents. Poles sometimes have to be relocated during road moves. A lot of poles have been replaced in recent years when they didn’t have enough room to add fiber, requiring a change-out to a taller pole. The extra useful life of steel poles is negated for poles that have to be replaced, and in that case, the lower upfront costs favor wooden poles.

With that said, there are a lot of places where a metal pole makes sense. If you’ve never noticed, poles that carry significant loading from cables usually are supported by guy wires that go from the pole to the ground (shown in the picture above). The guy wires support the poles in times of heavy wind. It often makes sense to place a metal pole in places where there isn’t room for the guy wires. Metal poles are also often preferred when really tall poles are needed.

An interesting issue to consider is emergency repairs on poles. Linemen use strap-on tools like spikes, gaffs, or climbers that allow them to climb a wooden pole. Working on a metal pole requires a bucket truck. After an emergency that affects multiple poles, it’s far more efficient for making repairs for linemen to be able to climb poles without having to wait for an available bucket truck for each pole.

When considering all of the factors, it’s pretty obvious that utilities still prefer wooden poles over metal poles. But you generally don’t have to search very hard to find places in urban markets where metal poles were the right solution.

Adoption of WiFi 7

Ookla recently published a research article that documents the implementation of WiFi 7 in the U.S. and around the world. WiFi 7 routers were introduced to the market in early 2024, and Ookla reports that deployment of WiFi 7 routers has already grown to 7.2% in the country. That’s a pretty big uptake in a year and a half, considering that broadband customers generally hang on to WiFi routers unless changing service providers.

It’s not surprising that WiFi is being adopted. WiFi 7 brings a big improvement over WiFi 6 and earlier generations of WiFi. WiFi 7 can theoretically reach much faster speeds, and in practice delivers faster speeds and performance inside the customer premise. Some of the specific benefits include wider data channels inside the home, particularly for customers who have devices that can use 6 GHz spectrum, which is 1,200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 GHz and 7.125 GHz. WiFi 7 has better data throughput to devices by the use of 4K-QAM, has better performance from preamble puncturing that can bypass interference, and has faster speeds for specific applications due to multi-link operations that let the router combine multiple frequency bands when needed. WiFi 7 has also doubled the number of simultaneous devices that can be connected from eight to sixteen.

As might be expected, the growing WiFi 7 adoption is mostly coming from ISPs. Charter is currently the biggest user of WiFi 7 in the world. In the U.S., the new technology is being deployed by other large ISPs like Comcast, Frontier, and CenturyLink. It’s likely that the upgrades to WiFi 7 will continue. For years, ISPs have been frustrated by a large percentage of customer complaints about broadband that are actually due to poor customer-provided WiFi modems.

Interestingly, the U.S. is leading the world in WiFi 7 adoption. Part of the reason for this is that China is not stressing the use of WiFi 7 inside the country since the nation has decided to use 6 GHz spectrum for cellular traffic instead of for public WiFi.

The impact of the WiFi 7 routers is dramatic. Ookla cites speed test statistics for Comcast that show that upload speeds have more than doubled for some customers strictly due to the installation of a new WiFi 7 modem.

WiFi technology isn’t sitting still. The first prototypes of WiFi 8 modems should be produced later this year, with commercial production is about two years. WiFi 8 adds even more features that will help the customer experience. The most interesting new feature is Dynamic Sub-band Operations (DSO) that will allow the WiFi router to assign tiny bandwidth channels instead of a full channel when connecting to devices that don’t need much bandwidth. WiFi 8 also has the ability to coordinate with neighboring WiFi routers to cut down on interference. There will be a new technology called Distributed Resource Units and ELR that will improve the upload path to cut down on upload stutters from devices like security cameras and smartphones.

There is even more improvement coming with WiFi 9. The official specifications should be released in early 2027, with commercial adoption likely coming in the early to mid-2030s.

Cable Companies Continue to Upgrade

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.

Is AI Changing Traffic Patterns?

Mitch Wagner of Fierce Network recently published an article that claims that AI is blowing up 30 years of traffic network assumptions. He claims that AI traffic is smoothing the daily peaks and dips in network traffic that all ISPs are familiar with. While every ISP is a little different, any ISP that serves a lot of end-user customers expects traffic peaks in the evening, smaller peaks during the daytime, and very low levels of network traffic at night.

Network engineers have always paid close attention to the peaks, which were the main factor in determining the size of network connections. Nobody wants to have a network that restricts bandwidth when customers want to use it the most. The cable companies learned this lesson the hard way during the pandemic when customers suddenly needed to work and school from home and found the broadband connections unable to meet their needs, particularly in homes where more than one person wanted to use the network at the same time. Every network engineer I know can cite the busy hour, busy day, and busy week on the networks they manage.

Wager says the peaks in traffic are evening out and that networks are seeing a more consistent demand throughout the day. Wagner cites Ed Fox, the CTO of MetTel, from an interview given for a Fierce Network Research report.

I have no reason not to believe Mr. Fox. However, MetTel is an ISP that operates in major urban centers and likely serves the kinds of businesses that have become heavy AI users. It’s not hard to imagine that an urban ISP serving businesses might be seeing a drastic change in traditional network traffic patterns. But I have to think that MetTel and other urban business-centric ISPs didn’t have the same traffic patterns as other ISPs before the advent of AI.

I work with a number of ISPs and I have not heard anybody talking about a big change in traffic patterns. My clients work in a variety of markets, from rural to urban, but none concentrate on the urban market business that MetTel is experiencing in places like New York City.

However, I appreciate the article, because if it’s true, then most ISPs, except for fully rural ones, might eventually see some shift in traffic patterns due to AI. I am curious to get feedback from this blog from IPS to hear if anybody is seeing anything like the big changes being experienced by MetTel.

The Wagner article also claims that upstream bandwidth is growing faster than downstream, reversing a 30-year design assumption built around heavy downloads. This is something that has been well documented by OpenVault. They’ve been shown that upstream usage has been growing faster than download usage starting in 2024. In the first quarter of 2024, national average upload usage increased by 13.2% compared to 7.7% for download. In the first quarter of this year, average upload growth was at 19.8% while download growth was at 7.8%. OpenVault credits most of the growth in upload usage to computer software synching with data centers.

Wagner claims the upsurge in upstream usage comes from AI inference traffic moving towards the edge, particularly for video processing. What he means by that is big growth coming from uses of video cameras for functions like AI-driven video surveillance at retail locations, camera-equipped wearables, and cloud-based operational technology in applications like oil and gas asset management. I hope that the big national companies that monitor traffic begin tracking this issue. I’d love to hear more about the trends in specific traffic, like video surveillance and wearables.

Network engineers all understand that upload traffic is usually a tiny fraction of download usage, with average download usage a dozen times more than upload. With the possible exception of cable companies, upload usage is largely an afterthought for network engineers, who barely consider it when sizing and designing networks.

I have no doubts that there are localized situations where AI traffic is making a big difference in network traffic. But for ISPs that mostly serve residential and small business customers, I still have to think it’s a tiny, possibly unnoticeable blip.