Mediacom has never been afraid to take a leap of faith if it means bringing next-gen technology to the rural communities in its footprint. When its DOCSIS 4.0 technology gave an impressive showing in a laboratory environment, the operator was faced with two options—wait and allow some of the larger MSOs to launch first and work out any initial wrinkles or strike out and be the pioneer. Mediacom CTO JR Walden was more than ready to take the leap.
“If the new technology is ready and the upgrade… is customer impactful, why not try to push?” he says. “Every day we wait to move to the new technology is a market that will never have those capabilities.”
The move to DOCSIS 4.0 required upgrading the network to a 1.8 GHz spectrum capacity and implementing an ultra high-split architecture. Mediacom tapped ATX Networks, Harmonic and Hitron to serve as its initial vendor partners, providing everything from 1.8 GHz amplifiers to unified Remote PHY devices and a vCMTS.
When it came time to deploy, Mediacom asked for volunteers across its organization that felt positively about the condition of their local network to offer their locations as possibilities for the initial rollout. In the end, it settled on a small group of customers served by a single node in Moline, Illinois.
“Every customer was contacted in advance. We told them we would want to come out and install a new 4.0 modem and that we were going to leave it blown wide open. They were going to get all the speed that was possible and we were going to find out together,” Walden says. Almost immediately, speed tests were showing promising numbers of 9 Gbps downstream and 3 Gbps upstream.
While DOCSIS 4.0 unlocked more capacity and the potential for reduced latency and higher speeds, Walden was most excited for the installation of new smart amplifiers that would offer network telemetry that had previously been unavailable.
“We’ve gotten shockingly good at looking at the endpoints and telling what’s going on in the middle, but a dream of mine was: can we proactively not just monitor, but manage a whole part of the access network?” Walden says.
Mediacom now has approximately a thousand nodes deployed on DOCSIS 4.0 and it estimates upgrade costs at approximately $180-185 per home passed. It also believes these upgrades can be finished at a pace that is three to four times faster than a comparable PON fiber overbuild. Customers are not required to swap out their CPE at the time of a DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade. That change is recommended if a customer decides to subscribe to Mediacom’s 5-Gig tier, which was introduced to more than 500,000 locations across nine states in May.
“There is an outage when we do the upgrade, but we’re basically upgrading whole networks in a day. Everything that impacts the customer is done in a day… and we’re not tearing up roads, disturbing flower pots, none of that stuff,” Walden says. “I think it’s often forgotten when you talk about these kinds of upgrades just how much the community and customers appreciate that versus some of the things they have to deal with when a different technology or provider comes to town.”
Fast Facts
Mediacom’s broader DOCSIS network modernization efforts have reduced service calls by 40% in upgraded markets through the deployment of new equipment, modernized network architecture and smaller service nodes.
Applied Optoelectronics has joined the Mediacom vendor family, providing 1.8 GHz amplifiers and line extenders as well as its QuantumLink remote management and monitoring software to the operator as part of its DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade efforts.
Mediacom aims to make its 5-Gig tier available to more than one million homes by the end of 2026.