Count equity research company Cowen as impressed by the cable industry’s “10G” marketing efforts at CES earlier this month.
“Worries of 5G threats remain overdone, with the cable industry recently showcasing ‘10G’ at CES (10 gig speeds) as we’ve noted in the past that DOCSIS 3.1 has a pathway to 10 Gbps speeds, essentially future-proofing the network especially as demand-rich applications proliferate over the next decade (8KTV, VR/AR, gaming),” reads a run-on sentence in a report spearheaded by Cowen analyst Gregory Williams.
Related: CES: Cable Declares It Won’t Be ‘Second to the Door’ to 5G With ‘10G’ Branding Launch
At CES earlier this month, cable operators, tech vendors and lobbying orgs gathered together to counter-market the high-volume hype around 5G, branding their up-and-coming Full Duplex DOCSIS technology as 10G.
Separately, with Verizon set to kick of fourth quarter earnings reports next week for major pay TV suppliers, Cowen predicted the sector will report Q4 losses of around 1.14 million customers. This compares to nearly 1.5 million lost in the fourth quarter fo 2017.
Cowen also predicted a slow quarter for cable operators’ consumer mobile businesses.
“Each MSO is at a different stage in their respective Mobile strategies,” Cowen said. “As for net adds, Comcast has some momentum as we forecast +250K phones. Charter could be off to a slower start as we look for +60K adds … it may be a case where there’s simply not enough phone adds to go around.”
