- Charter's CEO tends to brag about the company's HFC network and downplay the need for fiber
- But Charter's business unit Spectrum Enterprise prefers to offer fiber
- And Spectrum Enterprise has technology to offer cable TV over fiber for large customers
The CEO of Charter Communications often seems on the defense when it comes to fiber competition. On earnings calls with investors, CEO Chris Winfrey touts Charter’s hybrid fiber coax (HFC) plant and says the latest DOCSIS technologies make cable broadband just as good as fiber.
But the storyline is different for Charter’s business unit Spectrum Enterprise, which touts fiber as the optimal broadband solution.
For example, Spectrum Enterprise recently announced the expansion of a big fiber network at Wilderness Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. The resort is using Spectrum fiber to provide high-speed managed Wi-Fi throughout its 600-acre property along with cable TV for the resort’s 1,174 rooms with more than 3,000 TVs.
Asked why Winfrey talks so much about DOCSIS and doesn’t mention Charter’s fiber initiatives, Raj Mukherji, vice president of Vertical Markets at Spectrum Enterprise, said the biggest business for Charter is serving broadband to residential customers, and that’s what analysts want to hear about on investor calls.
Of the approximately $54.6 billion* of annual revenue for the company, Spectrum Enterprise accounts for only about $2.7 billion, although it is the fastest growing business unit within Charter.
For its part, Spectrum Enterprise is very focused on fiber.
“We believe fiber to be the best medium for voice, video and data,” said Mukherji. “Our preference is to lead with fiber.”
Mukherji said fiber was the best solution for Wilderness Resort because it was such a big project. Of course, Charter has a variety of solutions for different-sized organizations.
For Wilderness, Spectrum Enterprise installed 1,400 Wi-Fi access points and increased the resort’s internet bandwidth with download speeds up to 10 Gbps, enabling as many as 10,000 guests and employees to access fast Wi-Fi wherever they are on the property.
Fiber-based cable TV
Interestingly, as part of its contract with Wilderness Resort, Spectrum Enterprise is providing all the guest rooms, condos and cabins with its Fiber Connect Plus TV, which provides high-definition TV with more than 120 cable channels. The video is delivered through a private and dedicated fiber connection and no additional equipment is needed at the TV.
Mukherji said, “Wilderness picked us because of the quality of the video feed.”
But fiber-based cable TV seems like an oxymoron. How can fiber deliver cable TV to a room without some kind of set-top box to decrypt the signals?
Charter pointed to its website about Fiber Connect Plus TV and fiber TV, which described the service at a high level without much detail.
“We bring it in over IP, and it gets converted at the customer premise,” said Mukherji. “We are converting that IP signal over to what the TV needs over Cat 6 cabling.”
He said when an enterprise customer subscribes to Fiber Connect Plus TV, Charter builds a content delivery network (CDN) at the edge to house the video, and it creates a private network connection from the CDN to the customer. Then the customer can distribute inside their facility via wiring.
Dell’Oro analyst and Vice President Jeff Heynen has knowledge that the fiber at Wilderness Resort terminates at a Remote PHY device (RPD) located in the building. That RPD essentially functions as a media gateway, taking the video feed from the Spectrum headend through the fiber and then terminating that fiber at the RPD, which then distributes the video to the individual TV sets.
Heynen said as cable operators roll out more fiber to MDUs and other businesses, they can no longer rely on traditional residential video architectures using HFC and a set-top box. He said enterprises don’t like to clutter up their spaces with set-top boxes.
When they’re not watching TV, guests want Wi-Fi
In terms of fiber broadband at Wilderness, Spectrum Enterprise has built three separate networks: one for the guest Wi-Fi, one to support voice for the resort’s call center and another to keep staff connected to a property management system, coordinating room cleaning and maintenance.
“We’ve run miles of fiber laterals at that property,” said Mukherji. In addition, he said the middle-mile and the fiber backbone to support the resort are all owned by Charter.
*Charter's revenue number was updated after publication of this story.
