2008 cable capital expense trends

Lower prices on cable modem termination system ports are likely in 2008, and this often means that the cable companies are putting pressure on the vendors with advance notice of procurements. The changes in pricing will come with some capability to re-architect the downstream bandwidth to the home, allowing either standard DOCSIS 2.0 rates up to about 15 Mbps or DOCSIS 3.0 rates as high as 100 Mbps. The former is more likely to deploy here in the US. A big push by cable players in 2008 would benefit Cisco significantly and would likely drive cable capex higher, to win the MSOs more Wall Street ire.