Since the cable industry's TV footprint extends to nearly 90% or more of America (the industry's independently unverified numbers), there seems to be a new meme mysteriously circulating that assumes DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades will soon be everywhere. That's the general consensus of a new Pike and Fisher report that claims that blisteringly fast cable DOCSIS 3.0 speeds will be "available to nearly all of their customers within the next five years."

That optimism is largely driven by Comcast's promise to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 to all of their customers by the end of 2010 (and 65% by the end of this year), and since Comcast services about half of all cable customers in the country, that's considered a solid base. Analysts then assume that all other carriers, including Cox, Time Warner Cable and soon-to-be-bankrupt Charter Communications will slowly deploy the technology to everyone by 2013.

Of course, nobody seems to talk about what drove cable into all of those rural American neighborhoods in the first place: those "annoying" local franchise authorities the phone companies just got done dismantling so they could avoid having to deploy telcoTV to less profitable portions of rural America. With fairly weak state-level franchise agreements now the norm, and no telcoTV competition that can't be handled by DOCSIS 2.0, what pushes cable the extra mile? That's where Pike takes time out of their analysis to lobby for cable stimulus funds:Of course, relatively speaking, DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades are cheap in comparison to running fiber to the home, so carriers may just upgrade for the the hell of it. But we've all-too-frequently watched carriers leave certain markets in upgrade purgatory (the now sold "Middle America Cox," or MAC markets come to mind). There's a growing trend (among cable and phone companies alike) of selling these unwanted less profitable rural markets to companies who can barely run last-gen networks, much less afford next-generation upgrades.

In full historical context, this new argument that DOCSIS 3.0 is going to soon be available to "nearly" everybody seems both naive and blindly optimistic. The question is: how big will DOCSIS 3.0's coverage gap be? 15% of cable customers left un-upgraded? 30%? What's your guess?