Man-of-Leisure Ask Comcast, although I’m sure they have a good handle on upgrade timelines and utilization growth vs capacity growth of those un-upgraded systems. They probably came to the decision they’ll upgrade the majority of them before they have bandwidth issues they can’t resolve on a low split system. They’ll have plenty of newer, higher density low split equipment removed from upgraded areas they can transfer to help with low split congestion issues, so no real budget requests to approve.
It’s difficult to do that when you can’t reliably forecast when a node or even a city is going to be upgraded, like with Charter. Charter still has to buy lots of new equipment to fix low-split congestion issues and some of that is getting hard to come by with multiple vendors having stopped producing it.
The big problem with upstream congestion is the impact it has on downstream speeds when the ACK packets can’t get through. That’s noticeable, especially on games or streaming. It’s why Cox started reducing customer upstream speeds to 10mbps on some nodes when they couldn’t upgrade the nodes fast enough to cover the upstream utilization increases during Covid.
Anyway, most people wouldn’t even notice if their upload changed to 35mbps. They don’t care enough to know what their speeds are today. They only care when their apps stop working the way they used to.