Cable brings fibre close to home

Modern cable networks contain significant levels of optical fibre. In many networks, cable operators have taken fibre to less than 100 metres from the customers' premises with the last part of the network that connects the home to the network being coaxial cable. Hence the name 'hybrid fibre-coax' (HFC) network, which is used to describe the majority of modern cable networks.

The investments that cable operators are making in their state-of-the-art HFC plant is creating a next-generation network that reaches over 100 million homes in Europe. Already today, cable operators are commercially deploying +100Mbps broadband internet services. Within less than two years cable's future-proof network will more than quadruple this speed.

The beginning

It wasn't always this way. Cable networks were originally established as unidirectional networks to deliver television and radio stations into the customers' home. Cable provided a high quality alternative to the aerial radio and television broadcasting that was often subject of interference. The old cable networks were fully coax based, and used a 'tree-and-branch' architecture.

At the network's headend television and radio signals were captured via large satellite dishes or antennas. These signals were then broadcast via the network to the customers premises. The network could only do one-way communication, it could not return any data from the customers premises back to the network headend or transmission centre.

Investing in Next Generation Networks

In order to upgrade these networks to two-way capability, operators decided to invest in fibre, giving them a future proof network that could ultimately deliver almost unlimited bandwidth both to and from customers premises. Fibre backbone networks were installed at Pan-European, national, regional and local levels, bringing fibre as close as 100 meters from every individual customers home.

Upgrading coax networks to HFC has meant:

1. putting a lot of fibre in the ground
2. creating small segments of homes that are connected via coax to the fibre backbone
3. installing new hardware at the network headends.