Cox Executive Thinks That Fiber Is The Future

Jeff Finkelstein, the executive director of advanced access architectures for Cox Communications, is on the constant lookout for plans to maximize investments in access portion of their network, so that they can offer the best internet service to their customers. He also encouraged considering non-regrettable and regrettable investments. Regrettable investments are those aimed at resolving customer issues for a short term and will be replaced soon.

“As we go through the planning, what are the things we are going to do that we are not going to regret doing or if we are going to regret it, make it a choice,” Finkelstein urged. Placed high on the non-regrettable list is the plans to pull as much as fiber network as possible.

“As you are pulling this fiber, this is the opportunity to build the network of the future — and our natural tendency, particularly of the outside plant folks, is to just overlash yourself and pull it down and when you need to, you’ll pull it off the strand and connect it into a tap,” he added.

“Instead of that, pulling a fiber through pedestal and pulling enough to support long-term strategy makes much more sense,” Finkelstein said. “One of the things you need to give serious consideration to when you do these splits, do you have a PON strategy or an FTTH strategy, — EPON, GPON, Ethernet, wavelengths, whatever you want it to be?”

The Cox executive director acknowledged that there is much latent capacity in Cox plant, but the various cable operators should be realistic about the demands of customers. Statistic shows a 49% compound annual growth rate for the bandwidth and this means the capacity to deliver 2 Gbps service by 2021 and 10 Gbps service by 2026.

“Cox has a long life and a long useful life but how do we optimize each and every spend we have and prepare ourselves for the next step?” he said. “You won’t regret having that bandwidth because it will produce a better customer experience.”

Finkelstein also noted the decision of Cox to make use of switched digital video and one-gigahertz plant. “Those were spends we never ended up regretting. Some of it [was] because of some very smart folks — we are standing on the shoulders of giants in the cable industry but now it’s our turn to prepare it for the next step for the people that will be standing on our shoulders to keep it going and have all the capacity our customers will need.”