What he said. Actually 50Mbps was a
side effect of other work, not the original intention. The BSRs and Cisco 10k's were being introduced to the network for capacity relief as the previous uBR7246VXR had reached end of life, that they were DOCSIS 3 compatible was a huge bonus!
The 50Mbps DOCSIS 3 overlay network resolved downstream congestion issues however due to it being done on the cheap it created upstream congestion issues which are being resolved as part of both the 100Mbps project and the 10:1 ratio project. Taking several nodes and combining them across 4 downstream channels giving 200Mbps of downstream capacity and only 1 channel of upstream for each 1/4th of the downstream nodes at about 9Mbps of capacity wasn't really wise given the legacy network was most often a split of 38Mbps downstream, 4 x 9Mbps upstream.
In some respects these products follow on from each other very well, little things like when doing a resegmentation for 100Mbps doing three of them, splitting the previous single area into 2 then splitting each of those reducing the homes passed per node by 4 times ready for the 10:1 project are pretty efficient.
This will certainly be a more expensive year than the 50Mbps rollout
