Cable operators are increasingly competing with telecommunications carriers, and the winners in the long-term will be those service providers that build the infrastructure capacity to deliver ultra-broadband services.
Commonly defined as greater than 50 Mbps symmetrical throughput, ultra-broadband solutions such as Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) for the home, business, or Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs) can easily service today's broadband needs and gracefully scale to ultra-broadband access networks that support hundreds of megabits of symmetrical throughout to each subscriber.
While carriers are building out their fiber infrastructure to support higher-speed services, cable operators wrestle with the challenge of balancing the need to optimize the return on existing investments in HFC networks and applications with the need to deliver ever-increasing bandwidth requirements.