Cable operators worry about HDTV

[Van]

Sure you will see dozens upon dozens of dbs dish's in the metro and suburbs but that is a given as people do the promo shuffle. Cables advantage in cities is that in most mid to northern cities tree's are more of an issue than it would be in southern localities. DBS appeals to those who are on a strict budget because outside of a promo cable is not cheap at all unless your city runs its own cable service wich is what two of them do here in the Detroit area.

Another plus that DBS has over cable is that you can take your dish and a box with you in the rv, out on your cabin cruiser, or up to the cabin for the weekend, cant do that with cable.

Cables plus is now with bundled services of its own that it provides and not through a partnership and that in itsself is a big plus for many people now. But what hurts cable is the slow progression out into the country side and this will be a mistake if they dont wake up and realize that out on that dirt road 5 miles outside of town there is a 3k unit subdivision going in as is the case with many locations all over the country.

 

[digiblur]

Cable providers could gain a lot of bandwidth by simply moving all of their QAM64 carriers to QAM256 carriers.

Then if they really got bored they could move the retarded shopping channels to the "free" tier you get on the digital boxes. They could even leave them in "ITC" mode so QAM tuner users could still watch them when they get bored. That would free up about 3 or 4 analogs in my area. There's 6 HD channels right there if my provider kept the same scheme of 2 HD's per each QAM256. Another thing they could do is slide in a one or two SD channels on the HD carriers. 2 of the locals here do a little bit of multicasting so there's some room to spare on the QAM256 carrier since they are only getting a trimmed down version of the HD channel. There's lots of bandwidth on my local cable system. I have no doubt in my mind they could add 6 HD channels right now if they wanted to.

 

[Jimbo]

depends some telco's run fiber to a cev(controlled enviromental vault) then switch to copper at that point . This really really extends the range of DSL

You are correct,
In many areas we now have CEV or slic cabinets or now x-cut boxes where we can use DPG pairs and suddenly the sub who was 4 miles away can now be 1500 feet or less from the x-cut box and have DSL showing only 1500 feet of cable therefore DSL as fast as you sitting next to the Central Office.

DSL has come a long way as far as getting it out to normally out of range sub-divisions, then again there are still areas that cannot be reached due to the lines not being in place, also cost and priority... Now the push is for V-Rad cabinets, so you can get the above mentioned and Video. SONY... Soon only not yet, in most areas

Jimbo

 

[navychop]

Cable card 2 is for 2 way comms- so you can eliminate the STB (supposedly) and still get PPV, etc. It has nothing to do with switched video. Cable card 3, anyone? Cable card ver 100, maybe?

Fiber? Not quite. It depends upon how generous the ilec is, or upon local laws. Another way of running fiber, and I believe this has been the most common way, is to carve it up into many voice quality only bands. DSL resides at frequencies above the range of human hearing. Voice frequencies use only a small portion of the capacity of copper. Telecos see no point in providing the full range of frequencies thru the fiber for each line subscriber, when they could pack in many, many more voice bands of limited frequecy range each, over that same fiber. UNLESS they use it to offer DSL themselves. It's only recently that ilecs have gotten the DSL religion. They hated 3rd parties for providing it and wanted the world to go with ISDN. HA! Reality crept in.

So maybe things have changed, but fiber was often a way of cutting out the competition, since the sharing rules applied to copper, not fiber (for the most part).