AI is everywhere, so it’s no surprise that it’s being woven into the operations of cable broadband networks as operators look to stay steps ahead of service impairments, automatically fix some of them and improve overall customer experience. Meanwhile, broadband customers are using AI at an accelerating rate, but AI-related data consumption is not yet having much of an impact on overall network usage.
AI in cable network operations is becoming a bigger part of the picture as cable operators and other broadband service providers gain access to more real-time data from their networks, including at the edge, where they’ve begun to deploy a new generation of nodes, amps and modems equipped with AI-capable neural processing units.
Comcast has deployed more than 500,000 “smart” amps for its ongoing DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex (FDX) deployment, said Elad Nafshi, the operator’s EVP and chief network officer, during Wednesday’s general session at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta.
Pictured (left to right): Matt Anderson, global market lead, telecom industry, Google Cloud; Elad Nafshi, EVP and chief network officer, Comcast; Justin Colwell, EVP, technology strategy and innovation, Spectrum; and Mark Bridges, president and CTO, CableLabs
But there needs to be a way to separate the noise and manage that data to determine the context of issues – such as a fiber cut – and how to act upon them.
“You can get choked on data and not know what to do with it,” Nafshi said.
Agentic AI is helping Comcast rapidly sort through volumes of alarms and when necessary put them on a single ticket, he said. And the data being obtained and analyzed is constantly being reflowed into the system to train AI models, with a goal of improving analysis and recommendations.
AI “is as confidently wrong as it is confidently right,” Nafshi said. Today, root-cause analysis agents are over 90% accurate, a figure that Nafshi hopes will be getting close to 99% by the time of next year’s show.
Progress is happening elsewhere, too. Nafshi estimated that Comcast is now able to “deconflict” more than 50% of trouble tickets. “We’re just getting started,” he said.
Areas in Comcast’s footprint with FDX are seeing a 59% boost in quality-of-service improvements and a 21% reduction in outage times.
AI usage by broadband customers is also on the rise and isexpected to continue increasing. However, the current impact on overall network traffic from those customers is still relatively small.
Speaking on the same panel, Justin Colwell, EVP of technology strategy and innovation at Spectrum, noted that more than half of his company’s broadband customers use an AI agent of some kind. AI-related traffic is growing quickly, up 350% year-over-year, he said, but it still represents 0.1% of the downstream usage and 0.3% of upstream usage on the Spectrum network.
That compound annual growth rate is expected to continue rising as adoption of AI-assisted cameras, physical AI (robots) and self-driving vehicles increases. And that proliferation will have a material impact on the upstream, Colwell predicted. Those trends are demonstrating that the move to symmetrical gigabit speeds with DOCSIS 4.0 “will pay off,” he said.
Sharpening the edge
Spectrum and Comcast areboth investing in AIand embarking on new business lines at the edge of the network – including at headends and hubs. Those sites are being equipped with compute and Nvidia chips, and they are being used to open up new lines of revenue. That’s coming about as both operators virtualize the access network, a migration that is enabling them to free up and repurpose space, power and cooling.
Here at the show, Spectrum touted some use cases for deploying compute and low-latency connectivity at the edge, including demos of new, already in-market deployments and a connected humanoid robot. The operator, which just wrapped up its merger with Cox Communications, said it’s in a position to provide capacity within 10 milliseconds to roughly 500 million connected devices in US homes and businesses from those edge locations.
“Physical AI is coming fast,” and the latency requirements for it can’t work on a 100-millisecond roundtrip to the cloud and back, Colwell explained. Spectrum has more than 1,000 such sites, and that real estate and the capacity that’s being freed up has “become a strategic advantage,” he said.
Revenues from that strategy are starting to materialize as partners plug into that infrastructure, said Gary Koerper, Charter’s SVP of emerging technology and innovation, during a briefing on the show floor.
Cast AI, for example, is using Spectrum edge data centers – which Koerper views as a neo-cloud concept – to support a GPU-as-a-service model for some internal development of their products. Hydra, a startup, is using Spectrum’s edge infrastructure to support its role as a broker between customers that need GPU capacity and those that have it.
HP, meanwhile, has tapped in for a Z Solutions offering for graphic arts studios to provide compute to connected, high-performance workstations. In a sense, HP is extending its LAN to Spectrum’s network to access more compute resources, Koerper said.
Comcast talked up its recently announced partnership with Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN). Fastly is running as a software container on Comcast’s edge platform. The general idea is to offload peak traffic events, such as streams of live sporting events, and place them closer to customers.
Peacock, NBCUniversal’s premium streaming service, isalready tapping into that system toimprove the efficiency and latency of live sports streams delivered on the NBCU-owned premium streaming platform.
Comcast, which is already focused on improved picture quality and low-latency with itscurrently sports-focused Real Time 4K system, estimates that it currently operates more than 200 AI-powered edge compute centers in the US.
Oracle was revealed as another company using Comcast’s network as a service.
Oracle sees it as an opportunity to support the low-latency delivery of both live and on-demand media, but especially for a “thundering herd” of viewers for popular live content, Jon Dakss, VP of interactive media platform services at Oracle, said in a separate, on-stage conversation with Nafshi.
“Live video is really the perfect use case” for this evolving edge infrastructure, Dakss said.
Comcast will also be using its edge infrastructure to preposition other types of high-bandwidth, popular content, including massive game downloads and software patches, and to support cybersecurity services. Nafshi noted that Comcast has interest in running a DNS (domain name system) as a software container at the edge, which would help to reduce exposure to future, national DNS-related outages.
“We now treat the network as a platform,” Nafshi said, hinting that the Comcast network will be running a lot of new types of services “that don’t exist today” in the next 12 to 18 months at the edge of the network.
Google has already been working with cable by caching content for services like YouTube and handing off traffic. But that relationship is expected to grow as cable adds more compute and low-latency connectivity at the edge.
“With the advent of AI, generative AI…that relationship has evolved drastically in the last couple of years,” Matt Anderson, global market lead, telecom industry, Google Cloud, said.
