I’ve blogged about the value of utilizing consumer broadband access and the Internet for more business connectivity. What about the Comcast decision to deploy specialized technology for business services via a newly defined architecture model? Does this mean that Comcast is going another way, or even that it’s actually trying to avoid that consumer broadband leverage? Then, how do you explain their 10G DOCSIS decision? Split personality? Is Comcast pursuing two relatively independent architecture strategies for consumer and business, is it moving toward a tactical link between the two for infrastructure economy, or does it have a strategy?
Cable providers like Comcast rely on CATV cable for most of their last-mile connectivity to customers. The capabilities of CATV vary with the version of DOCSIS in use, but generally CATV is shared media and thus has a higher risk of QoS impacts created by other traffic, and at least a theoretical security risk. However, business services based on CATV have been popular with SMBs and even with some enterprises, who want to connect small branch/remote locations.
Comcast is upgrading a lot of its plant to support the DOCSIS 4.0 specification, which offers 10G/6G maximum download/upload speeds. This would make CATV competitive with much of the fiber broadband plant, in particular for uploads. Since uploads are usually more critical to businesses than to residential users, that would make the service more broadly useful to both SMBs and to enterprises for small-site connection.
Comcast also offers other business services via Ethernet, suitable for larger sites, but it’s not universally available. The new converged optical model of delivery would improve optical broadband connectivity to businesses, and it might also have benefits in edge computing. It might even be beneficial in the creation of a universal metaverse model.
First, let’s look at the two upgrades together. Wireline broadband suppliers face a challenge in that residential broadband and TV services need residents and households, neither of which are growing fast enough. Comcast has already started to increase its rates to raise revenues (ARPU) because the number of users isn’t growing. In fact, competition from other technologies (telco fiber, 5G FWA) is starting to tap off some existing customers. But business users are under-penetrated, so growth there is still possible. My data suggests that there are about four million business sites in the US that are or could be connected, and about a million and a half are satellite sites of multi-site businesses. You can sell to perhaps fifty thousand companies to address all those satellite sites.
If you have the right stuff to sell, which is the aim of the announcements. You need to improve DOCSIS to improve your connectivity to those satellite sites, but also to be more effective in single-site business sales. You also need a way of building the equivalent of an MPLS VPN for multi-site businesses, which is the aim (I believe) of the optical convergence architecture.
The essence of the architecture is a new terminating box that can reside on the customer’s premises or in theory in a Comcast data center. It links via fiber to a wavelength integration shelf that’s located with the Comcast hub, and from there back to the metro center. This provides a fast and low-latency way of connecting the commercial fiber service with the CATV access network, and onward to the metro point where the Internet connection is made. It also improves end-to-end visibility overall, particularly for business customers who use CATV/DOCSIS to connect their smaller sites and optical Ethernet to connect larger ones.
One thing this setup could do is improve the latency and connection management for multi-site companies, and that would be positive for Comcast’s business aspirations. The same setup could, in theory, be used to couple edge computing hosting provided either by Comcast or by a third party, and that could enhance the value of the offering for IoT and (gasp!) the metaverse.
I’m sure everyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I believe that we need to think about the metaverse concept more broadly than the social-media context you see most often. A metaverse is a digital-twin, communal-use, visualization, model. Each of those things can have a specific implementation that’s tuned to the mission, but one thing I think we can assume is that all metaverses will be “communal”, meaning that they will represent a series of interdependent digital-twin elements whose behaviors need to be reflected across the community as a whole. That means defining both a compute/hosting model and a network/connectivity model, and both have to be able to deliver results with minimal latency or the system loses sync with the real world.
It’s interesting to speculate on whether Comcast sees metaverse deployment as a viable opportunity, or sees it at all, for that matter. The material I’ve reviewed doesn’t make any explicit connection between their architectural changes and the metaverse, and generally the cable companies have been even more hidebound in the old traditional service models than the telcos have been. If I had to guess, I’d say that the potential metaverse applications of their architectural shifts are an accidental byproduct of going after the business market in a more serious way.
That raises another question, which is whether Comcast would push a modern over-the-Internet SD-WAN approach to business VPNs along with this change. They do offer SD-WAN today, but their diagrams show it as a small-site adjunct to a “private data network”. Might Comcast make a specific push for an SD-WAN-over-their-optical-architecture model as a total VPN solution? Given the reluctance of the telcos to go that far, it might be a very interesting play for them.
The potential issue with using the new Comcast architecture as a metaverse connectivity framework, or even just an IoT framework, is the latency. Potentially, DOCSIS 4.0 still has greater latency than many alternative access technologies, including 5G. That could limit the utility of Comcast’s capabilities. It might even impact the credibility of their business SD-WAN delivery, though most SD-WAN applications have greater latencies than MPLS VPNs.
Analyzing just what properties a new business service based on these architectures would present, and what applications it might facilitate, will have to wait for release and use. I suspect that when that happens it may also be possible to determine what Comcast thinks about the future of services, and its own revenues.