- Vecima COO Clay McCreery said 2026 will be a turning point for DOCSIS 4.0 deployment, even as operators take their time with upgrades
- The cable gear market has been in a slump, but Dell’Oro has predicted purchasing will pick back up this year, particularly on the vCMTS side
- As for gigabit speeds, McCreery thinks operators will keep focusing on marketing 10 Gbps for the foreseeable future
Cable’s in rough shape on the subscriber front, but perhaps operators will soon have better luck on the network side. Clay McCreery, chief commercial officer at Vecima Networks, predicts 2026 will be the first year we see “large scale” cable upgrades to distributed access architecture (DAA) and DOCSIS 4.0 take form.
“We’ve been planning for this as an industry for years now. It’s been three, four, five years of work, standards, getting ready, getting going,” he told Fierce. “We have dozens of customers that are all launched in calendar ’25 but [are] really going to hit the ground running I think in ’26.”
The DOCSIS 4.0 specification promises download speeds of up to 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps uplink rates with a frequency range of up to 1.8 GHz of spectrum.
Thus far, only Comcast and Mediacom have publicly announced commercial DOCSIS 4.0 deployments. Charter, which already pushed back its timeline a couple of times, said in October its high split upgrades (which basically involves expanding the overall frequency stream to support symmetrical multi-gig) are “going well” but it’s not actively marketing the capabilities until “we get further down the road from a national perspective.”
McCreery noted one of Vecima’s Tier 1 customers is "probably 60 or 70% done already,” while other operators are taking their time. Asked what he thinks is holding back more DOCSIS 4.0 rollouts, he said it’s not really one specific challenge but rather the sheer process of revamping a big, complex network.
“You’re touching the entire plant all the way down to the home, that’s a big investment…but I think there’s not a lot holding anybody back anymore,” said McCreery. “You make a decision like this, you’re going to live with it in your network for 10 or 15 years. So, it’s important to get it right the first time.”
He shared a similar view to that of Harmonic SVP Asaf Matatyaou, who told Fierce in September the pieces to deploy DOCSIS 4.0 are largely in place, it’s just up to the operators to make their plant upgrades and the vendors to roll out the customer premises gear.
Cable vendor outlook
Easier said than done, of course. Cable equipment spending slumped last year as operators losing subscribers “don’t need to buy as many units as they previously had,” according to Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen. Harmonic and Vecima are the two vendors that have been hit hardest by the purchase downswing, he told Fierce last fall.
McCreery pointed out tariffs brought forth plenty of “discontinuity” across the vendor ecosystem. However, he said Vecima has weathered that storm well given it has plants in both Canada and the U.S.
“Things that need to be built in the U.S., we can build them here,” he said. “Because we own our design process, we own our test equipment, we have all in-house engineers…we’ve been pretty responsive to the new conditions.”
Fortunately for cable vendors, Heynen recently predicted spending will pick up in 2026 alongside DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0 upgrades, while Low Latency DOCSIS “will drive additional software licensing spending, particularly on vCMTS platforms.”
For Vecima’s part, it entered the virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS) space in March 2024. About a year later, Cox (soon to merge with Charter) was Vecima’s first announced vCMTS customer. Aside from vCMTS, Vecima provides Remote-PHY devices for operators such as Charter and Belgium’s Telenet.
McCreery said Vecima also has an Access Test platform, which essentially creates digital twins of networks so that operators can test their DAA gear. Vecima acquired that technology when it bought network orchestration company Falcon V Systems in October 2024.
With the platform, “we can replicate and test not just across our own software but across every piece of equipment in the network,” he said.
“It used to be where you run these test plans and they were labor intensive. You were having an engineer run test plans, document them and move on to the next one,” McCreery explained. “Of course, now with AI and everything else, we’re able to build that out and do that in a very automated fashion.”
10G is still the sweet spot
Given Vecima sells both cable and fiber access products, McCreery also shared his take on the adoption of higher PON speeds.
In his view, “very few people” will need more than 10 Gbps speeds. Operators will likely deploy hardware that’s capable of 50-gig “sometime in late ’27,” but it’ll still be marketed as a 10-gig product.
“I don’t know when the operators are going to see a window where they want to go put a 50-gig product on their website,” he said, though Ziply seems to be an exception. “Because I don’t know if any of us are going to pay for it just yet.”