OpenVault CEO：上行流量持续攀升，有线电视运营商将无法松懈

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Optical fiber lines transmitting data with bright light

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Rising demand for upstream bandwidth is upending network plans at cable operators, but it's also pushing OpenVault to up its own network management game.

"Upstream is playing a bigger and bigger role in the household usage picture," said OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau in an interview on the SCTE TechExpo show floor in Atlanta last week.

The Miami-based company's Q2 2026 OpenVault Broadband Insights report found a 19.2% year-over-year leap in upstream usage. It's the third and steepest leap in a row after the 17.9% jump observed in Q2 of 2025 and the 15.9% increase tracked in Q2 2024.

Downloads still devour far more data than uploads, but the ratio has narrowed notably – from 16.6 to 1 in 2019 to 11.2 to 1.

Can cable keep up?

Fiber users, who generally have the advantage of symmetric speeds, make much more use of uplink capacity than cable users who continue to face slower uploads. The OVBI data shows average upstream data consumption hitting 94.1GB a month for fiber customers and 58.2GB for cable.

"We attribute that to gaming and to Zoom and Teams calls, as well as we're seeing a lot of AI content creation," Trudeau said. "Those files get uploaded to Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, etc, and that's driving a lot of the upstream usage as well."

That read comes from research by third parties that OpenVault has correlated with its own data. For example, the QI 2026 OBVI cited Aispire data revealing that cloud sync – inflated by AI models that had "tens of millions of users routinely uploading large context windows" – accounted for 15% to 16% of upload volume.

"We have to do it through partners," Trudeau explained, noting that OpenVault doesn't collect IP address-specific usage data. "We need to do more of that, because that is the most popular question we get: what is driving the upstream growth?"

Whatever the cause of that demand, cable operators have to try to keep up with it.

"We are seeing cable, HFC operators investing a lot in the upstream – mid-split, high-split strategies that have boosted the upstream bandwidth capabilities," he said, adding later: "DOCSIS just keeps pulling things out of their hat."

OpenVault is pitching itself as part of the solution for that competitive problem.

"A big focus of our product suite is to help cable operators mitigate the competitive concerns over upstream," Trudeau said. "The upstream is much more sensitive to noise in the network, so our solution is very focused on helping operators identify those issues, keeping the network healthy and clean."

The long-in-the-works DOCSIS 4.0 standard should level cable's competitive imbalance by supporting symmetric speeds, but cable operators will still have to tend their plant: "You can do that all you want, but you need the network to be healthy so that the subscribers are actually getting what they're paying for."

A changing business

OpenVault itself has had to make some pivots as the broadband market has changed. One of the biggest shifts: The slow demise of data caps also rendered much of the company's existing product line for ISPs obsolete.

"Pre-covid, that was a big part of our business," Trudeau said. "We were tracking usage per subscriber, assigning usage quotas, working with the operator to charge for overage fees."

So many ISPs temporarily suspending data caps early on in the pandemic meant "that part of our business really was de-emphasized."

Some of those operators did bring back data caps, but then competition from uncapped fiber and fixed wireless offerings effectively killed off what the pandemic could not – Comcast finally dropped data caps from its new plans last year.

"We started focusing at that time on what became top of mind for the operators, which was, let's keep these networks up and running," Trudeau said, citing network optimization products like OpenVault's Profile Management Application and Vantage. "It really changed our business."

And just as the rise of AI is changing broadband usage patterns, it's also reshaping how OpenVault handles network management by "collecting massive amounts of telemetry to be able to deliver our solutions in an automated way," as Trudeau phrased it.

"AI is certainly a big component of that – agentic AI, doing what might use to take field technicians six or seven hours to do within a matter of seconds," he said. "AI will take you a step further and help the field technician, number one, understand the root cause, and two, identify the fix."

Whither wireless?

FWA's dynamic capacity situation and mix of rural and urban geographies would seem ripe for the attention of a network analysis firm like OpenVault, but Trudeau said the company is still figuring its way into that market.

"We don't actually have fixed wireless solutions today," he said. "But we get asked all the time, what are the limitations of fixed wireless and its capacity?"

Trudeau predicted that OpenVault would be able to provide those answers.

"The evolution of the company is to continue to add additional access networks to that mix," he said. "We're access network agnostic between DOCSIS and fiber, and down the road we'll be adding monitoring capabilities for fixed wireless and satellite."

Trudeau cited discussions of trials of OpenVault services with fixed wireless providers, adding that some of its past work in cable would help set it up for this expansion: "Our RF experience in the DOCSIS world really does set us up pretty well for the fixed wireless space."

SpaceX's Starlink has become an additional disruptor in rural broadband. That company may not be ready or interested in giving OpenVault a peek at its satellite network's inner workings, but Trudeau said SpaceX had already started taking its own look at OpenVault's data.

"We weren't collecting data from them," he said. "But they were looking at our data as they designed their package plans and things because they wanted to understand the market customer usage segmentation."

Editor's note: The writer was a speaker at SCTE TechExpo 26 and his lodging was paid for by the conference organizers.

About the Author

Contributor, Light Reading

Rob Pegoraro covers telecom, computers, gadgets, apps, and other things that beep or blink from the D.C. area since the mid-1990s. In addition to right here, you can find his work at such places as USA Today, Fast Company and Wirecutter, you can e-mail him at [email protected], find him on Twitter as @robpegoraro, and read more at robpegoraro.com.