Have heard from more than one person that FDX plant upgrade programs may be scrapped due to high cost. In my market they have trialed plant maintenance doing the physical cutovers instead of BPs. There are several teams dedicated to this project that would no longer be needed if this is true.
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One thing Comcast didn't take into consideration is power. Oh boy let me tell you these FDX amps are power hungry. Have to add more power supplies to get a node operational. We are losing money daily. Everytime we pull up a node we see less and less subscribers. Business techs are pulling out more equipment from customers leaving us. It's truly a mess. This FDX cr-p doomed us.
@bp yeah, but that’s only one side of the coin. First, it’s much more than $100 per passing. Comcast told wall street that it’s more like $200, but with all delays and slow deployments it will turn out to be much more than that.
Second, the operational cost after all upgrades are still much higher than fiber. More truck rolls, more service, much more software development. A fiber network is much cheaper to maintain.
Third, speed and latency might be close to fiber, but the complexity in a Docsis network is much higher and thus it has more issues.
Fourth, customers request fiber. If it’s fair or not doesn’t matter. Comcast has a product that Comcast thinks is as good as competitors, but the customers don’t think that. If you can’t change that - you keep losing customers (for 18 straight quarters now).
Fifth, the $1500 is always used as a cost to do fiber. That’s an average. In dense areas, where you upgrade the entire network, you can do it for much less than that. Comcast could have upgraded all dense areas to fiber and kept Docsis where it’s too expensive to replace. A smart plan could have replaced large portions of the Docsis network for the same cost as upgrading to Docsis with all the above downsides.
@bn $100 per coax connect vs. 1500+ for FTTH, rural or edge of foot print even more. Tech leaders can only suggest, ultimately it is a financial decision based on ROI calculations.
@aa Fiber to the home is extremely expensive to retrofit especially in the city environment. Docsis advancements and fiber to the nodes are now getting 75% the speed & symmetrical uploads of the all fiber networks.
We all know Comcast could afford it, but we also know how frugal Comcast can be!!
How many time’s do they need to upgrade the coax plant before they realize fiber optics is the future like I’ve been saying for 20 years???
@a2 The CNO has been pushing this AI powered network BS for years now. It's nothing but snake oil.
@a1 It was sold to us as 'AI powered" internet but I have personally not seen any consumer marketing to this effect
It’s interesting that they built out FDX, then put no marketing focus on it and are now wondering why it’s not being adopted. Maybe if field sales teams had an inkling of where it’s deployed? A flyer or two? Literally anything? Such a bizarre deployment.