During the past decade, North American cable providers have spent more than $100 billion upgrading their networks. The past year has seen endless debate over whether these networks have the capacity to effectively compete with telco fiber to the home deployments.

In August, a Cablelabs report suggested another round of multi-billion dollar upgrades might be in order and that MSOs might be better off just running fiber to the home. Then another report insisted that the cable industry had plenty of capacity to compete effectively. Now, a new analyst report says that even with DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades, cable providers will have a hard time competing with Verizon Fios.

DOCSIS 3.0 will offer downstream data rates of 160 Mbps or higher and upstream data rates of 120 Mbps or higher (per channel). It will also incorporate Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and offer a plethora of other performance and functionality upgrades. For reference, DOCSIS 2.0, currently in use, delivers up to 40 Mbps down/30 Mbps up per channel.

But the capacity provided by DOCSIS 3.0 isn't going to get it done, insists the Light Reading report.

"By most accounts, FiOS wins the bandwidth battle against Docsis 3.0 hands down, a point that even the most partisan cable engineers and strategists usually concede," the report says. "Using its existing BPON architecture, Verizon is able to offer shared bandwidth of 622 Mbit/s downstream and 155 Mbit/s upstream, divided among no more than 32 homes."

And that's before Verizon upgrades to GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology. With GPON technology, which has been more popular in Asia, Verizon can offer 2.4Gbps shared downstream and increase its potential for HD program delivery via Fios.

The report claims that not only will Verizon be able to continually offer faster speeds than cable, but the PON driven network will cost less to maintain than the traditional hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) plant. It does note that cable upgrade deployment should cost less.

Among the flurry of predictions, it's important to remember that there's only half a million Fios subscribers in the United States. Many rural communities and second and third-tier cities won't be seeing either Fios or DOCSIS 3.0 anytime soon. It's also important to note that Verizon is the only major telco seriously pursuing the FTTH architecture. AT&T's planned FTTC/VDSL2 architecture will not match the capacity of DOCSIS 3.0.

On the cable front, many of our users, particularly those in less competitive markets, are still plugging along on DOCSIS 1.0 networks and won't be seeing DOCSIS 2.0, much less 3.0, anytime soon. Another study (tired of studies yet?) suggests DOCSIS 3.0 will reach 60% penetration by 2010.

Since many of you are going to be involved in these deployments, we'll ask in our latest poll which you prefer: FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 (Coax/fiber)? What are the inherent benefits of each? Will the differences be noticeable to the average consumer?