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*Disclaimer: I've worked in Cable for years*
They have been innovating. You can only fit so many channel frequencies into a line before you have to upgrade the line your using or find a new way of transmitting over the existing infrastructure. Any innovation that would allow for an exponential addition of channels to the existing infrastructure would be a gold mine. They're trying, and they're all in it together. When was the last time you heard of any one cable company inventing anything? They don't. They have a group dedicated to research which helps all of them.. Anything that the group comes up with is made an industry standard, basically IEEE for cable.

But going back to the infrastructure: cable companies are obviously bound to this. And it costs a lot to both maintain and upgrade. The first half of the 2000's many companies used cable internet and later cheap phone service to multiple advantages.
1 was generating more revenue by increasing the amount of services their customers subscribed too. This also lead to increased customer loyalty, since its one thing to cancel just your internet service if a company pisses you off but another all together to consider dropping a company that hosts your TV, Internet, and phone.In upgrading a system of say, 50k subscribers you could double the amount of money it generated, which means
2 the increased revenue offset the costs of upgrading systems to support the new features. Think back 10 years ago, what was the fastest speed you saw in major cities? 3-5 Mbps if that. Some area's have 50+ Mbps now.
3 by increasing the capacity when HD came around many systems where already ready for the initial wave of channels. They did innovate, which is why many area's have 50+ HD channels available now if you have an HD converter. Without the investment into rewiring many area's, cable would never be about to touch satellite as far as competition in many area's.

Upgrading systems costs an insane amount of money. That more than anything is the reason that cable monopolies exist, the cost of entry prohibits competition. To install a new plant in an town of 50k takes something to the tune of 2-3 million dollars, with zero guarantee on how long it will take to recover that cost, if ever. Cable lines have reached their limit unless someone comes up with a new way of multiplexing, and if its that significant a step up you'll see it deployed very rapidly. Some companies are switching to fiber but the cost is insane. And where as if someone cuts a cable line the service could be back up in an hour, if someone cuts a fiber line it could take significantly longer.

Having said all that, the "Usage Allowance Plan" is a crock of shit. It is exactly what it is being labeled as, a stop gap measure to keep people from dumping the TV service. Because cable companies get charged by the broadcasters based on their install base*, which includes internet only customers in some cases, they're trying to stop the current trend of "Internet for everything" since it inverts #1 & 2: less revenue generated, but now node capacity has to be increased. Does it make it fair for the consumer? Of course not. Are the amounts for the usage plans in use by the larger companies fair? Considering that a large % of the subscribers never come close to the cap, it depends. COULD they offer an 'unlimited' package? Yes. Which is why its a crock of shit, their could be a way to pay more if you use more, but thanks to other industries showing that micro-payments for additional service is a viable model for monopolies that isn't likely to happen. Hence this whole hullabaloo, they're trying to have their cake and squeeze money out of it too.

*ask anyone who's worked for a Cable call center about NFL network. Just don't do it when they're holding something stabby.

My understanding is that, if you wish to use any encrypted cable service, you either suck it up and rent the company's cable box, or you enter the delightsome world of cablecard 'compatibility' with so-called "host" devices. At present, because of the somewhat onerous(incidentally the 'open' in "opencable" appears to be a piece of gallows humor, not an actual description) certification requirements, specific Wintel hardware configurations are the only ones DRMy enough for the purpose, along with a number of STBs and TVs and similar appliances.

Apple's continued lack of enthusiasm for DRM systems other than their own makes adoption of Cable Card on any of their platforms less than entirely likely, and I'm pretty sure that there is a standing order at Cable Labs HQ that any Linux system not thoroughly Tivoized is to be stopped at the door and ejected by security.

If you are dealing with OTA signals, or snarfing analog feeds from STBs, or using non/weakly DRMed digital media, you have options; but if you want to talk to a commercial cable network, not so much...

(apologies for the bad Indy joke)

I don't know how your post got modded to "5, Insightful" when it should have been "0, Flamebait".

Read a little and learn something Informative, junior:

The terms http://www.cablelabs.com/udcp/downloads/DFAST_Tech_License.pdf/ of just one of the licenses necessary for selling a Uni-Directional Cable Product (better known to you as "CableCard support") requires the vendors to obey these copy-control flags (including the flag that says not to make even an initial recording). TivoHD and Tivo Series 3 recorders as well as newer versions of Windows Media Center support CableCards and thus are contractually obligated to obey this flag even when the station or cable company screwed up and mis-set it; MythTV does not support CableCards and that is why it ignores the flags. Tivo Series 2 recorders do not support CableCards and, accordingly, continue pay no attention to the flags because there is no contractual obligation for them to do so.

This was not a result of MS stepping on end-users or Tivo having been paid off by broadcasters. This is a result of the FCC giving a broadcast-industry group final authority over the licenses a DVR needs to support digital-cable.

I know a little about DOCSIS. DOCSIS 1.0 treats all IP traffic from a given host as one "flow", with one QoS. In DOCSIS 1.0, carrier-provided telephony might have a better QOS, but all IP traffic was treated as one flow.

DOCSIS 1.1 and 2.0 were supposed to have more QOS capability, and Microsoft put support in Windows 2000 and later that was supposed to use it, but I don't think it was really deployed at a level such that IPv4 precedence fields did anything useful.

DOCSIS 3.0 is supposed to know more about IPv6 QOS, according to this 750-page specification. Data is assigned to preconfigured "flows" using a matching system with rules for IP precedence, IP address, TCP/UDP source/destination port, etc. (See section C2, page 552.) Downstream queuing seems to be pure preemptive (see section 7.6, page 240), based on "priority". The spec seems to be kind of vague about when to queue and when to drop packets, but it kind of looks like you could configure a stock DOCSIS 3.0 system to do fair queueing. In U.S. Patent #7161945, Broadcom suggests such an implementation, using "leaky bucket" fair queueing.

The way to prevent abuse of the priority system is to traffic-limit the high priority traffic. DOCSIS 3.0 has support for that sort of thing; you could configure a flow with a low maximum latency and and a low downstream peak traffic rate, plus a "best effort" flow. If you send too much stuff on the low-latency flow, some of it is dropped. That sets up the right incentives to play nice.

The classification of DOCSIS flows into priority groups is entirely at the whim of the cable operator, and there's no way, apparently, for the customer to even read it. Which would be useful. "Net neutrality" is defined by those settings.

Founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry, Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) is a non-profit research and development consortium that is dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those technical advancements into their business objectives.

The article description isn't very accurate - when they say "lines", they really mean "channels". Cable modems now operating on a single 6mhz "channel" on the cable line. DOCSIS3 lets the modem "bond" several channels to increase bandwidth. Only one physical cable is still required. This takes away from the # of channels available for TV, but as they move more of the channels off analog to digital (which fit multiple channels in a single 6mhz band) frequency space is being freed.

More information can be found at:
1. Specifications: http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/specifica tions30.html
2. Press release: http://www.cablelabs.com/news/pr/2006/06_pr_docsis 30_080706.html
3. Ars Technica article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060808-7450 .html

There are a lot of cable comapnies out there, plus AT&T and Verizon are both now offering video services. The problem is that each one is restricted for the most part to set regions, and there are lots of hurdles to jump in order to expand your network. You say that competition can only exist if regulation forces it, but it's regulation that's preventing it. There is no competition. Franchising law needs major reform. We don't need more rules.

No joke. The FCC brokered (mandated) an agreement between the cable companies and the Consumer Electronics Association so that there was a standard assignment of cable channels to frequencies. The bottom several are required to be compatible with over-the-air frequencies, so channel 2 occupies the frequencies from 54-60 MHz, and similarly up through cable channel 125. This agreement was based on the FCC's decision that there would be a standard for "cable ready" televisions because they did not want customers for basic and enhanced basic cable service to be forced to rent a converter box from the local cable operator. Channel 2's location sets the dividing point for downstream (>54 MHz) and upstream (<54 MHz) frequencies. Allowing for amplifier filters restricts the top upstream frequency to about 45 MHz. Frequencies below about 15 MHz are often unusable due to interference from external sources, so the 30 MHz from 15-45 is typically all that's guaranteed to be available for upstream.

The cable companies and the CEA are working out similar agreements for standardizing digital cable (the OpenCable standards), again by FCC mandate. Additional information about OpenCable is available at the CableLabs Web site.

The "magic" you speak of is quite possible. It would not cost the government much more than five million to develop something similar to T.W.I.N.K.L.E. and since this was proposed about five years ago, they have had plenty of time to build it.

Of course, you are assuming they don't already have backdoors (NSA_KEY) in most people's computers already. Do I even need to mention ECHELON and CARNIVORE?

As an engineer at a leading cable modem company, I can tell you that the first request from the FBI to be able to tap anywhere, anytime was not technically feasable. Tapping into a QAM-256 link at a random point in the cable is next to impossible. To resolve the signal you have to be synchronized exactly with the cable modem and it is already syncronized to the head end. The modulation code can be updated about every 40mS as well. Just to give you an idea how tight the tolerances are, we have to compensate for expansion in the length of the cable due to the sun heating it during the day, every few minutes.

CALEA is in the PacketCable spec, which is the VoIP over cable. is the standards organisation for North America. Euro-DOCSIS specs are usually a close copy to the DOCSIS specs with a few minor differences like 8MHz bands instead of 6MHz bands we enjoy.

Ethernet? No. FireWire is designed for hubless, daisy-chainable, high speed, peer-to-peer device communications and control from the ground up. And you are incorrect about the distance limitations. Feel like you need TCP/IP specifically? No problem.

Additionally, FireWire is already widely used on almost all digital video cameras, decks, and equipment, is emerging on DVD-A devices, and is the standard interconnect for OpenCable set-top boxes specified by CableLabs.

This was what FireWire was made for. Unfortunately, its adoption and use has been crippled by an entertainment industry deathly afraid of the prospect of 100% digital transport, copies, recording, and manipulation by the end customer. What a shame.

IEEE-1394b, the current iteration of the standard, supports speeds from 100 to 3200 Mbps at distances up to 100 m, and supports its "native" 9-conductor shielded twisted-pair copper, ordinary CAT-5, and various flavors of optical cabling.

See the informative IEEE-1394b Technical Brief and What is 1394? for more information.

For even more information, including information about Wireless FireWire, see Intel's 1394 Technology site.

CableLabs article

It would be good if the actual MOU were published somewhere.

It is almost certain that 5C protection is specified for the 1394 interface. And it probably also specifies Macrovision for any analog video outputs.

Sadly, there are no fewer than 4 broadcast digital systems in use in the U.S. today: digital cable (64QAM or 256QAM modulation), ATSC (for airwave broadcast: 8VSB modulation), DVB-S for Echostar, and DirecTV's system.

All but DirecTV are based upon MPEG-2 Transport packaging/framing (but most MPEG decoder chips can handle both MPEG-2 Transport and DirecTV framing). Each has its own modulation, Forward Error Correction, and interleaving scheme, due to the differing respective characteristics of the cable, airwave, and satellite channels.

Add to this several different conditional access systems. Perhaps this agreement specifies CableLabs' POD pluggable conditional access module framework.

I don't see any victory in this for advocates of weak protection.

I also don't see a universal digital receiver coming from this alone. It is possible, though, that some receiver manufacturers will include multi-standard tuners and demodulators. The added tuner and demodulator costs should be around $14, which would show up as around $50 extra at retail, by comparison with a digital cable only receiver.

According to the DOCSIS 1.1 specification it is the responsibility of the cable modem itself to not pass other users traffic through, as cable internet is a shared medium like a hub. Some things will get through, though, since they are passed to a broadcast like DHCP, SSDP requests, and IGMP. I have Adelphia and can see these things coming in, as I should, but not other people's web traffic. Sounds to me that they posted something on BugTraq that is written up in a specification. Check out Cablelabs for the DOCSIS 1.1 specification.

That's the link to the NAT-alternative. It doesn't really seem that ominous. Nothing spelled out there that directly threatens NAT. Perhaps just some additional advantages that might make CAT better to NAT for the typical consumer.

• standards in home networking components, so your fridge can talk to your NAT device
  
• lower cost through standardized components
  
• standard allows for remote access by cable operators, to help with support
  
• quality of service within the home (??)
  
• security (??)
  

Here is the most technical paper I could find on the subject. it was NOT easy to find, anyway. It looks like (from 500 yards) a lot like SDMI's dingy.

Along the search I also found another artical on the subject, though it's pretty damm old (like 98), it seems that's when the MPAA got interested in the idea.

my option: fuck em' they can't stop people from recording what they have in their living room. However they can STOP via LAWYERS, that and people that can't offord to fight it, and that PISSES ME OFF

-Jon

I have an uneasy feeling about open IP telephony for individuals. It's really simple -- if you want enough bandwidth to support IP telephony, you're limited mostly to DSL or cable modems (wireless isn't widespread enough yet). DSL comes from the traditional telcos, and cable companies are also hot to provide telephony services these days.

A CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System, the headend equipment) can be configured to ignore a cable modem whose MAC address doesn't fall into a certain range (I'm not sure whether this is part of the standard MIBs or not) -- it's quite likely that a cable company will be able to throttle telephony packets that don't come from "approved" equipment. In the same way, I doubt that telcos are going to let everyone run their own IP telephone calls down a DSL line.

As others have pointed out, open IP telephony will likely be an option for commercial outfits who can lease a T1 or fiber connection. I could see a company with offices in several cities using IP telephony to connect their offices.

The good news, of course, is that IP telephony will eventually compete with traditional carrier-grade service, and that should mean cheaper phone calls for everyone.

-- Dirt Road

*World Domination is a trademark of that innocent-looking penguin...