Cox revises gigabit rollout plan, now targeting 2020 to go footprintwide: report

While it was unsuccessful in completing a goal it set three years ago to have its entire footprint festooned with 1-gig services by the end of 2016, Cox Communications is now targeting 2020 as the year it will have a ubiquitous gigabit-speed offering.

So said Cox VP Philip Nutsugah, speaking to Light Reading. The executive described a dual strategy involving both fiber and DOCSIS 3.1 to achieve the objective. 

Cox is also planning an upgrade of its HFC plant to DOCSIS 3.1, implementing converged cable accessed platform systems (CCAP) in the process. Nutsugah told Light Reading that a third of the CCAPs Cox plans to install should be in place by the end of the year. DOCSIS 3.1 services may not be available to Cox customers until 2018, he added. 

Cox has entered parts of 13 states in its 18-state footprint with 1-gig services built around fiber-to-the-home. The MSO continues to develop a “node-plaus-zero” architecture, pushing fiber to the last active node in the plant.

The combination of fiber to the premises and node plus zero, Nutsugah told the site, allows Cox to support greater bandwidth, as well as maximize capacity for things like Wi-Fi services in public spaces. 

"Cox, at the end of the day, is a connectivity company," Nutsugah said. "And so, take the city of San Diego for instance, not only have we built out ... fiber to the home in the city of San Diego, we also have a significant deployment of business B2B fiber.

"We've got some real interesting partnerships on the Wi-Fi side of the house so in the gas-lamp district, as an example, we worked with the city of San Diego ... for them to allow us to hang, unobtrusively, Wi-Fi access points on those historic streetlamps throughout that district,” he added. “We've partnered with them to have Cox Wi-Fi all through Balboa Park. We got on the USS Midway. So we have worked very closely with the city of San Diego to have that connectivity available."