They could drop the 200 or so channels that no one fucking watches and use that spectrum for more channels for cable internet upstream. It’s entirely possible, with today’s tech. Uploads were chopped down to nothing for the simple reason that people were using that bandwidth in the early days to share pirated material.
The technology is there, but we need to free up that space. Cable companies don’t just do things to their own beat. Cable Labs is the one responsible for organizing how that bandwidth is used and removing the cable frequencies to open up more internet frequencies is literally the next step.
But you need to do entire markets at a time. We can’t just upgrade the people that move to IP tv because at a certain point they share lines with people who haven’t upgraded so that bandwidth is already used.
Everyone needs to upgrade in an area to allow the business to reallocate that bandwidth. What you described is literally what is in progress right now. It just takes time
