stop lying

[mookeywee]

The other day a friend and I were discussing the differences between sat and cable. He has cable and really likes it/ He'd kinda like to have sat. that's when another friend stopped by and that's when things got interesting.

Me = well me
cableguy = friend who currently has cable
IT guy = networking guru

cableguy is interested in sat but appt manager said nope
IT guy said FCC says they can't do that but can place heavy restrictions on installation

Anyway the story got really interesting when I said that sat offer 100% digital signal while cable offers only some digital the rest are analog but they sell it as 100% digital (I started to sound like the DirecTV rep I talked to when I ordered my service). cableguy said that cable is 100% and DirecTV rep was lying.

That's when IT guy called us both idiots and told us this (hope I get it all right):
GEO, MEO, and LEO sats signals are analog
broaband coaxial cable (the type of medium not the marketing term broadband) signals are also analog. Then there was some stuff about broadband coax and baseband and well back to the story.

Niether one offers a digital signal. He says that the problem is that many people confuse the terms data and signal. In reality they both offer digital data modulated onto an analog signal (I think that's it).

As for the cable companies it's both. Cable is a "shared medium" or something. Then he got way too technical talking about channels and frequencies and trying to explaining why HBO is ch17 on a TV without a dig cable box and 300-to whatever with a digital cable box.

Do sat providers (talking about Charlie Ergen (sp) and other CEO bigwigs not retail monkeys) really think there aren't people that know better? Are they stupid? Are are they misleading the public with shoddy marketing tactics?

 

[mike123abc]

If you get technical nothing is digital... Even a computer chip after all it is relying on the ANALOG votage fluxuation to represent 1s and 0s. Satellite uses microwaves which are analog. But, the information carried is digital, and they use digital error correction.

Note that being "digital" does not mean a better picture. Most cable companies are digital to the neighborhood. Most use fiber optic cable to get the signal to near your house and then they convert it to analog (except of course the digital stations). The advantage of satellite is that the picture is exactly the same nationwide. Cable depends on what the local company is doing. Cable is very good in some areas and will give a better picture than satellite, in other areas it is not good. You have to do a comparison in your neighborhood to decide which is best.

 

[charper1]

In the case of D* and E* look at it this way; it IS digital from them to you.

You must know they are companies that mearly rebroadcast to you via their service.

They get a vast majority of their signals off of huge C-band and Ku-band satellites (analog as well as digital) just like you & I could directly.

Remember BUD? I still use mine. It still offers the best sound and picture, even the analog is better than DBS and cable and much cheaper subscriptions, BUT, it is not user friendly, it is expensive to startup, so companies gave up on their R&D and promotion of them because of these facts, thus it is dying for the END user. It is still the method of choice for the broadcaster, your cable and DBS companies.

OK, (the ultra simple speak) after they pull it off of the analog C-band, they compress it (now they call it DIGITAL) to make it smaller in size, add their security scheme and coding, and beam it to their satellite so they can direct it back to your DBS dish and IRD for decoding.

They are now the middle-man. They took a great, cheap product you & I could get ourselves, made a user friendly device and application to receive it, and are selling it to us at their markup prices.

This is all they have done.

Now that they have effectivly killed the BUD, they gear up to add more and more satellite locations, and keep pushing bigger dishes and more add-ons to get them. And trust me when I say they will place just enough services on each bird to "force" you to need the new gear.

 

[mookeywee]

I was talking to hime today and he called me a "tard". He said that he wasn't telling us that so that we could run out and try to throw everyone into a tizzy(sp).

He just thought that it was rather silly to compare cable and sat based on signaling techniques when they use the same thing (analog).

He did say that it was kinda misleading because satellite providers are claiming to have a 100% digital SIGNAL when it's not the signal that's digital.

Here's the definitions of data and signal that he gave meL

data - entities that convey meaning
signal - electric or electromagnetic encoding of data and are used to transmit data

Sat providers and some CATV providers apparently want to confuse the two. He even told me that TW cable commercials in the area don't claim to use a digital signal.

He did find it funny that sat providers calim to use something they are not. A 2.4GHz digital cordless phone use an analog signal to transmit data.

Like I said in my first post they seem to want to confuse the two

Even a computer chip after all it is relying on the ANALOG votage fluxuation to represent 1s and 0s.

IT guy says that's not really an accurate comparison. It's 1 and 0, on and off..

I asked about that and he emailed me this so that I'd copy it right:

"This person should really rather study the diference between analog and digital signaling. Analog signal are continuous wave forms that can be at an infinite number of point between some given min and max.
Digital signals are discrete waveforms. Between a minX and maxY the waveforms takes on only a finite number of values. On and off (1s and 0s)."

 

[mike123abc]

Well both Dish and DIRECTV use QPSK (and Dish uses some 8PSK). Yes it is an analog carrier wave which they change the phase to represent 4 possible states (8PSK has 8 possible states). They are discrete states representing 0-3 or 0-7, currently they transmit states 20 million times a second (QPSK, dish does 21.5 mil on 8PSK DBS satellites). No they do not flash the signal on and off to make it "digital", but you are just being difficult and nit picking to go off and say it is not a digital signal.

 

[mookeywee]

No they do not flash the signal on and off to make it "digital", but you are just being difficult and nit picking to go off and say it is not a digital signal.

Passed this along to IT guy. I wish he would just get on here and explain but he says he won't register just to post a couple of threads at a forum he doesn't plan to visit that often.

He simply says this:
No matter what type of data or how you compress or modulate it, it's still transmitted using an analong signal. Call it a quasi-digital signal (as someone apparently did) all you want but it won't change the fact that it's not a digital signal.

A digital cordless phone manufacturer, for example, can advertise all it wants to about digital this and digital that but in the end it still sends data from the handset to the base using an analog signal.

 

[mike123abc]

Your IT guy is just going off on a tangent I would not listen to him any more. Yes everything comes down to analog in the world. Even though he claims transistors are digital they are not. They do not really turn off... just ask Intel how they are handling the power consumption on chips when the off state of the transistors is almost equal to the on state...

It is a digital transmission on an analog carrier. Your IT guy does not want to register and post because he would be ripped to shreds, all he is doing is trying to flame and stir up trouble. Tell him to go back to school he should take some electrical engineering classes.