> These days, cable TV companies routinely sell gigabit or near-gigabit download speeds to their HFC-network customers. but ultimately coax is polishing the br

> These days, cable TV companies routinely sell gigabit or near-gigabit download speeds to their HFC-network customers. but ultimately coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. gigabit down, yes, but at what contention ratio? and how many upstream channels are bonded for a reasonable upstream speed? It's not uncommon to see something like a comcast setup that is 800 Mbps down, and 16 Mbps upstream. How much traffic throughput can a given section of coax/DOCSIS3 network support if a large percentage of people actually start using their upstream for more than a tiny percentage of the time? in terms of future upgrade path and ultimate life span of the outside plant cable network, singlemode fiber to the home wins every time... one theory as to why the speed offerings from click/rainier connect are so poor is that the coax plant has not been subdivided into small enough sections to actually support anything like gigabit to the consumer. now this would require going through and re-engineering it, breaking parts of the network apart physically, and installing new small CMTS in neighborhood aggregation points.