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Cringley On Bandwidth-Expanding Modulation Technology
jtappan writes: "Robert X Cringely has an article describing a new modulation technology that will allegedly allow cable modems to run 10 times as fast, and which will eventually allow existing cable networks to carry 500 HDTV channels."
-h-
I have boxes filled with old modems, ISDN routers, and Ethernet hubs that are all perfectly functional, but useless to me. I have closets filled with old computers that run like a charm...
After reading this, I sent Cringly my shipping address. Do you think this is a bit too forward?
Cable modems are already capped. This just
means 10 times more unused potential. There's
no competition forcing providers to open up
those pipes.
I almost got excited about this, then I realized that the Cable companies couldn't manage a decent ISP if you held a gun to their heads (believe me, I wish I could). As someone who has had cable modems since '95, let me tell you it has not been pretty. After the recent @home fiasco, I have lost all faith that even if this technology ever comes about, that it will be even close to anyone's expectations because the cable companies will ruin it.
Making the cable modem faster may be nice sometimes i suppose. BUT this does not mean that max throughput of the Cable company will expand. All it means is that it will be EASIER for LESS users to saturate a Cable companies bandwidth. They would be stupid to upgrade their existing clients or future users to a technology that will cost them more money in transmission costs. They already gripe about usage the way it is. Do you really think they will willing make it easier to suck up more bandwidth?
It seems that the last few articles cringley has wrote have been about technology that is facinating and very exciting. So when am I going to get my fuelcell powered car with my uwb radio, that takes me with my laptop with a solid-state harddrive to my personal airplane?
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Cringely reports the folks are about to set their design in silicon so we'll find out then but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. On the other hand the basic theory is pretty easy to test and apparently they've convinced more then a few folks who've apparently done their due diligence.
- If the signal propagates properly
- If it can be discerned from ambient noise and other channel's interference
- If the processing delay isn't too great
- If the chipset is cheap enough
- If the upstream folks roll it out
Etc.ps To every first year student - think carefully before pointing out why this won't work. I expect that better minds then yours have had a look already so check your numbers and facts before posting please.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sure, it would be a great technological advance. Unfortunately, as we have all seen, this really means very little. Espically in the ISP game. With the recent consolidation of ISPs into 3 or 4 major players, getting this type of thing out seems even more difficult. We can't even use the technology we have. Cable companies limiting bandwidth. DSL providers requiring you to log off every 2 hours. None of that is necessary to the technology, but those in charge feel the need to add these "features" in order to squeeze every last bit of cash out of the users. Not to mention trying to get them to roll something new out. Good Luck.
When I look at where we are headed, sometimes I just get more and more depressed.
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
If you'd read the article more carefully, you'd have found that Rainmaker's technology operates at OSI level 2, so it's completely independent of the type of wire. All that would be needed would be new modems/routers/NICs/etc.
Camblemodems are able to run much faster than they currently do. They are told to run so slow for a few reasons.
1. Cost them money to get the big pipe for the users
2. Make you play well with others
3. They tailor the service for people who would not be willing to pay more for more bandwith.
4. They have a monopoly, so they can do what ever they want with very low risk of losing you to compitition.
I've downloaded 700k a second, and uploaded over 500k a second on the old lancity cablemodems in fremont cali years ago. Sicne then they have pushed cablemodems that they can control the speeds on. And they do, they slow them down hugely.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
It's nice that ISP's could provide 100x faster service, but they're already capping the bandwidth they DO provide. I think this technology is solving a problem that simply doesn't exist in the cable ISP game.
:-)
That's not to say this tech doesn't have other, awesome applications. But I don't think cable companies are exactly going to be lining up to roll this out.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Why dont you can Katz and give Cringley a job?
I wonder what the ratio of katz-ignoring-slashdotters vs cringley-article-hits is.
This is similar to what modems do. AFAIK, they still don't run any faster than 3750 baud (Hz),
but they can encode up to 15 bits per wave to get 56kbit/sec. If the line isn't so quiet, they cannot distinguish all 15 bits, so the modems have to negotiate a constellation with fewer bits.
My question is how this will work with an ethernet-like collison detection system that AFAIK cable modems use. The jam signals could get ugly, and I'm not sure you can carry as my info on broadband as baseband systems. Or how cable decoders will cope.
The article states that this is exactly what this does. The modulation is on LAYER 2, (emphasis on the layer) of the OSI model, so that doesn't matter what you are running. It'll get through. It's just a clock signal chip. Oxx, Txx both have clocking mechanisms to allow the high bw packet transfers and a chip on the clocking mechanism (say included in your csu,dsu on your cisco router), and an upgrade from the telco will allow this to happen, independent of what you are running. He mentions cable, but this could be used for many things, even wireless. (i think) any corrections to the contrary are gladly accepted.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Cable modems will keep the same data rate, they'll just decrease the bandwidth by 10X and put a bunch of HDTV channels in the remaining bandwidth.
Of course it will be years before that happens because users that own their cable modems and will be resistant to buying a new one for the same data rate, and the cable company will have to replace the modems for people who rent. This will reset the break even point for the extra $10/month you pay for renting the modem, which doesn't sit well in a business plan.
---- Smokin' another sig.
Basically, they can already give me faster speeds but they are artificially capping it. So why would an article that says they could provide even more speed make me hopeful?
Really, does this guy have any shame? And what's all this about astroturfing for M$'s .NET initiative? It really isn't all that great, dude. You're just a marketing dupe.
Is your company running tools written by ma
After reading the article, I checked out Rainmaker's site. These guys have a theory, some patents, and some simulations. What they don't seem to have is any working hardware that proves this 10X bandwidth increase can actually be achieved in residential cable systems.
Does this remind anyone of Transmeta, who promised processors with a fraction of the power consumption at higher speeds? Everybody loved them when all they had was a press release. The actual product didn't work as advertised, and now they've faded away.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 10X uber-bandwidth schemes sound suspiciously like 10X uber-compression schemes. I'll reserve my enthusiasm when I see working hardware.
Rainmaker's website who make the tech he's talking about. (Like no one would have found this link otherwise)
You got to wonder if this is one of the SEC sites.
With all that extra bandwidth do you think they'll remove the "Thou shalt not VPN" provisions from their terms of service?
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
... for those of us using a LAN/NAT to put multiple computers on 1 connection, then the bottleneck on a 10 GBit internet connection will still be our ethernet cards and hubs/switches/routers. And also, for a machine not on a NAT, with the modem inside, would most likely still take an enormous amount of processing power to recieve 10 GBits of data per second. (And to store it somewhere. Most computers have an IDE drive, of which the *fastest* transfer rate is 133 MB(its?) a second, which is another bottle neck even if you have a 1 GBit NIC -- I'm not sure about SCSI)
So it may sound nice (I agree, I'd love to have it), but a internet connection is only as fast as the slowest link in between Machine A and Machine B. (So on a 10 GBit network, you'd still be capped at the speed of your network card, which is usually only 10 MBits.)
Not to mention any caps that the ISP sets up (which is already happening on 1.5 MBit cablemodems)
I'm not even going to try to evaluate the technology Cringely keeps rolling out week after week: IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), and between the UWB debate last week, and now wavelets for networking, I'm throwing in the towel.
/. demons. Collusion between the few big players will keep any new technology carefully overpriced until the last possible drop of profit has been squeezed out of the old.
However, he keeps talking about how all these new technologies are going to roll out any day now, with no increase in cost. That's simply wrong. From the cable (or telco, ISP, etc.) point of view, they have basically no reason to drop the prices on their current services more than a pittance -- people are still queueing up on six-month waiting lists for good ol' 256Kbit DSL, so why should they turn around and offer 1-10Gbit for the same price?
You could argue that competition will drive prices down, but that would be naive as well. The telecommunications market isn't open: it's a cabal, just like the recording industry, and other favorite
...if Slashdot is going to be posting nearly every single article that Cringley writes (five times this past month) shouldn't he basically get his own Slashbox or topic?
I mean, I know Slashdot is a user-submission site but of given Cringley's anti-Microsoft pro-techi slate I think it's a given that someone's going to be submitting everything he writes. Shouldn't Slashdot be somewhat discerning in which articles they post? If I wanted to read everything he wrote I would just bookmark his site (as I have done). To see it posted on Slashdot every week seems, I'm sorry, -1 Redundant.
How about we just link this and be done with it?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
http://www.terayon.com/cat.html?cat_id=9.1.1.2
Anyway, this is what my benighted cable system uses to give us cable modem without the muss, fuss and bother of installing modern fiber-optic plant. Believe me, it isn't very fun.
Maybe they can squeeze more speed out of the wires. Maybe. But you're going to suffer for it with lowered reliability. When you have to powercycle your cable modem every day to make sure you've got connectivity something is VERY, VERY WRONG.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
while i enjoy cringley columns, his mangling of the bottom layers of the OSI model made me cringe (pun intended).
encoding systems are physical (layer 1) technologies, not 2nd layer like he claims. he further states that ethernet and token ring are layer 3 technologies, which is blatently false - they are both data link technologies.
maybe i'm just being nitpicky....
I'm wondering if the cable companies would even bother investing in the equipment to make this possible. Given that the phone companies can't provide any serious competition in this market and the barrier to entry for anybody else to do local loop service is too high, I can't fathom why an incumbent cable company would bother. They already make pretty good money off the services they provide, so why take the financial risk?
If the average consumer would be willing to pay a premium over their current service to get this upgraded service, it might make sense. But if a large group of consumers isn't willing to pay substantially more, there's no reason to bother unless somebody else is offering a competing service. Since there's nobody capable of that right now, there is no competition and therefor no incentive to innovate.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I have a 64K (128K when coupled) ISDN connection for about $20/month here in France (without having to pay $10 for the telephone since my phoneline was replaced by these three marvelous digital channels). But my country invented ISDN, and here it uses our national Transpac network (created in 1978 and also used for the most modern bank network in the world, health system and the Minitel, a 1200 bauds terminal which was distributed by the State for free in '85 - the year of my birth ;-)
do you have an equivalent of it in the US?
can't wait the 10X improvement! I will have a 640K/1280K synchronous digital connection!
Brand loyalty is nothing against the power of 10X.
X10's brand loyalty isn't too crash-hot either.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Goes down smooth and tastes great. Makes you 10 times stronger, smarter, and more attractive to women. Cures cancer, aids, is a method of birth control and can be used an industrial lubricant. Its Snake oil! Snake oil you say? That's right! Enough for every investor! Choc full of buzzwords and vitamins!
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Modems are basically completely maxed out given the contstraints that they operate under. Your math assumes getting 10 bits per hertz (realistic) and getting 56KHz (unrealistic). The phone system is designed to carry voices, not binary data. As a result, it's optimized for the frequency range of the human voice, which only extends up to the 3-4KHz range. In fact, unless you live in the sticks and are calling your neighbor, it is almost for certain that your call is being carried digitally. If so, it's being sampled at 8Hz meaning that due to Nyquist you can't send any frequency higher than 4KHz thru the phone system. Period. You'll notice that if you figure out the bits/hertz that a 56K modem sends, its as good (~8 bits upstream) or better (~13 bits downstream) than what this company is claiming to get.
Basically, they have a system which works as well as a phone modem. Not too suprising really, I suspect that the fundamental limitations on signal and noise are pretty similar for the two different kinds of copper wire run to your house.
I'd rather see advances in backbone speed than last mile speed, thank you. Cable modems are already capped at a fraction of their potential because of insufficient capacity at the ISP side. Give the ISP a couple of gigabit connections, open up the cablemodems to 10mbits, and I'll be perfectly happy, for a couple of months anyway...
True (easier to sature trunk lines), but consider this; during 'quiet hours' when traffic is lighter, now the lone porn surfers can have faster access. During congestion nothing helps (but bigger pipes), but off-peak hours faster last copper/coax mile eq does help end users. Of course burstiness of traffic increases as well, but that shouldn't be much of a problem.
:-P). The only cause of this I can see is people sucking up more and more bandwidth on the frontend that the provider hasn't allowed for.
Similarly, if traffic prioritizing is done decently, the fact that some clients have faster local connection shouldn't make situation worse for those with slower connection. So, faster cable modems shouldn't necessarily make it harder for others, provided capacity is fairly shared, not by end systems but by routers doing QoS queuing.
You've hit the problem a lot of the High Speed ISPs are facing - backend provisioning a high speed network.
Sympatico used to (and seems to still be) provisioning thier Central Offices with a single T1, so your 968K connection would get choked as soon as more than 20 people were connected to the same CO. I was just speaking to someone with thier DSL service and they explained that it gets slower during peak hours (so much for thier "Always fast!" advertising angle
QoS is a possible solution, but it could get un-weildy very quickly, especially if it's not secured properly. (Dude, I hax0red the Cisco and now I reseverd myself the whole pipe! I am l337!) A better solution would be to make sure the backend can handle more than the capacity of all the frontend pipes aggregated in order to keep QoS exposure to a minimum.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
History has shown that given a choice between transmitting the same number of channels at higher quality and transmitting a larger number of channels at the same quality, broadcasters will choose the latter every time, because they make more money that way.
We will never, ever see widespread HDTV in the US. We'll be stuck at NTSC resolution for the rest of our lives. Heck, if they could convince people to live with 100x100 digital video streams, they would, just so they could squeeze even more channels out of the same bandwidth. They drool at the idea of 50 million channels of shopping and other crap. Picture quality? What the heck is that?
Free Hans!
Nobody said you'd be constantly streaming 10Gbps all the time and saving it to disk. To me it's more about how quickly a page downloads, not how much stuff I can download overall. How much time do you spend reading a page vs. downloading it? Take this comments page for example, I would easily spend 5 minutes reading everything. As it is, the page only takes 5 seconds to download, but, if that could be decreased to near instantaneous I'd love it.
An entire web page and all its related files (even graphic/sound/flash heavy pages) could easily fit in most modern PC's RAM. Stream it all direct to RAM and pop it up on the page? Why save it to disk at all? For your cache? You wouldn't need a cache if you connection were that snappy. And just think, we could actually stream streaming video instead of spooling streaming video... No disk involved.
I could see ISPs moving away from limiting your instantaneous banwidth (i.e. capping you at 1.5Mb/sec) and moving towards capping your average bandwidth (i.e. 5Gb/hr). I mean, so what if I choose to eat up my hourly bandwidth allocation (say, by downloading several linux distros simulataneously) in 0.5 seconds instead of an hour? (Technical issues of me saving off that much data that fast, aside.) The overall useage from the ISP is the same. OK, so maybe it takes me 2 seconds instead because there are 4 people queued up ahead of me with big downloads. It would still be very snappy in comparison to today's setups.
What this means is that they will throw 10x as many people on the same wire. duh...
Whatever became of the data over power line system that was so cool like a year ago? Did they figure out that it was too expensive?
A 33.6kbps modem runs about 3 kilobaud, with an 11 bit per symbol QAM constellation.
A 56kbps modem runs 8 kilobaud, with 8 bits per symbol. The telco digitizes voice at 8 bits per sample, 8 ksamples/sec, and the modem actually is just using that. However, the phone company "bit-robs" the signal, taking a few bits here and there to do in-band signaling on the line, hence why the modem cannot rely upon getting all the bits, all the time.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I would say that this is exactly what they are looking for. It gives them:
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Current cable modems have separate downlink and uplink signals, running on different frequencies. Only the uplink signal has any need for collision detection; the downlink signal all comes from one source (router or switch), so there's no need to worry about collisions.
I can't claim I have a good idea of what they're trying to do here. But if they're proposing a system that can run over a broadband line, with a separate downlink and uplink, then they would simply apply the new modulations to the downlink. You might also find some way to apply the technique to the uplink, but it's nowhere near as important.
If they're proposing something closer to Ethernet, then they'll need to rebuild the system from scratch. I have no idea what they'll do to avoid collision problems.
Wavelets are an alternative to Fourier Transformation of time domain data to obtain a functional decomposition of the waveform for analyis or processing. They are particularly useful with choppy or spikey signals.
It's a very fundamental mathematical tool for any kind of signal processing application. As such it has a wide range of applications. It came into wide use perhaps 15 years ago; perhaps you were out of school by then. I am sure that every EE undergraduate is getting exposure to wavelets these days.
Here is a link to resources on Wavelets:
http://www.mathsoft.com/wavelets.html
That's right! Its theorized that the key to cold Fusion is in wavelets!
In addition, the government has proved that wavelets, when properly applied, are responsible for keeping George Washington alive all these years in a secret location.
Since your a wireless engineer, I take it you know how the Fourier series and transform works - the ultimate idea is that a series of circular functions of various frequency, amplitude, and phase (sines or cosine functions).
Wavelets work similarly, except that instead of sines or cosines as the basis, a bandwidth limited function, such as rect (not used that often) is used as the basis for the series. There are a few obvious advantages to this (there are some other not quite so obvious ones that I won't get into).
1) Different basis functions can be chosen for different domains based upon which function most compactly represents the desired signal. (For example, it is impossible to perfectly represent a triangular wave by Fourier transform, but quite possible with some wavelets).
2) More data can be fit into a single stream since all the waves are localized (unlike sine and cosine, which are infinite).
The long and short of it is that it is a very good frequency transform.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You are not being too nitpicky. Cringely is an idiot^Wjournalist, not an electrical engineer.
:-)
I, too, was cringing when I read the article. He JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Layer 1 is what defines token ring and ethernet, not layer 3 (network addressing). Even if this rainmaker technology wasn't a scam, layer 1 is where you define both the physical medium and the signal modulation that works best with the medium. Changing TV cable modulation would cause tons of knock on effects, with cross channel interference, harmonics, parasitics, and probably Nyquist reflections cancelling out other channels.
And I know far too much about QAM, as it is used in modems. QAM has existed for decades. It isn't used on cable systems because there is no way to keep the signal clean enough to recover a tight constellation on grungy, up in the air exposed to the elements cable systems. Shannon's limits on recovering signals from noise get slowly pushed back from time to time, but his model is still sound. Its not going to be replaced by wavelets or whatever the scam buzzword of the week is.
As for costing US$10, HA! The cable companies would have to replace their entire HFC plant, and every repeater, splitter and signal booster to work with signals that filled each 6MHz channel with wall-to-wall noise. Most of the cable companies offering internet have just placed a little piggyback backchannel filter around each of their repeaters to get a single channel back to the HFC headend. They haven't replaced all the repeaters or much of anything, and they still grumble about the cost.
Nope. rXc deserves to be kicked around for this shameful piece of drivel. And slashdot is just the place to do it
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
In Reston, Va, and I haven't had any trouble yet. Two or three outages in the past year, neither of which lasted long, and good tech support.
Best Slashdot Co
64 QAM and 256 QAM are the standard modulation schemes for digital cable and HDTV over cable in the USA.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, Cringley gets it wrong. Modulation happens at the PHY layer, not the LINK layer. So either this is a crock of s**t as big as what ZeoSync was stirring, or Cringley has his head up his arse. Notice that that's not an exclusive-or.... both could be true.
This link pretty much covers it. I'll quote the most relevant bits:
So, in other words, the Physical layer is where signaling happens. (This is where QAM and this wavelet snakeoil are relevant.) The Link layer is where PPP, SLIP, and Ethernet Packet encapsulation happen. (Not Ethernet signaling, just the 802.3-or-whatever framing spec.)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
We need legislation to split provising of packet services (Which can be a licensed monopoly, like a telco) from content services.
Lots mroe about this
Mr. Z is correct -- moderators, promote the note I'm replying to! Cringely is wrong about layers. Layer 1 does all the bit stuff, including modulation and even ATM cells. (Layer 2 is about user-sized frames and error detection.)
But that's not what matters. Shannon matters. You can't defeat Shannon, and Cringely admits it. So let's see... Shannon basically says that the limit of bps is proportionate to the product of bandwidth times the log2 of the signal to noise ratio. So if you have an infinite SNR, you can have infinite bandwidth. But getting 33 Mbps (around the top end of DOCSIS cable modems) requires good SNR. My cable modem right now has 36 dB SNR and is running QAM64; DOCSIS adapts speed to line quality.
So even if wavelets were better than QAM (and I can't say, because Cringely doesn't tell enough to know if this is real or a scam), there's just not that much more you can do in 36 dB! (Shannon limit of 6 MHz at 36 dB is around 6M*12=72 Mbps.)
The way I see it, cable companies are doing things wrong. Instead of bundling an internet channel within their video channels, they should be sending video on demand channels over an internet pipe. One cable, or fibre into the home, into a box that splits out a number of phone lines, a number of video channels, and a number of ethernet lines.
The problem is that the infrastructure is not there. Of course this scheme would cause telco vs cable wars, ISP vs. telco wars, etc. Our bright shiny future gets pushed back a few more years.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That's true for Cable TV, so Cable TV cables are already relatively clean.
This is probably one of the reasons they are focusing on cable TV. Most other existing wired technologies (phone, ethernet, speaker wires, etc...) tolerate reflections much better, so the infrastructure has a lot more of them.
Easy! We just sell 'em about a dozen of these new Rainmaker chip thingies, and then they can install them in series on their phat pipe! Man that would rock!!
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
while i enjoy cringley columns, his mangling of the bottom layers of the OSI model made me cringe (pun intended).
Your pun would be funnier if you spelled his name right.
"And like that
The bandwidth is already available on the backbones. Shitloads of fiber running through the country. What we don't have is enough switch processing power.
"And like that
I slipped into dyslexia reading that last word -- it appeared, for just a second, that he was talking about the power of pop-under advertising.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
remove profits and input net sales.
;-)
profits will rise as time goes on.
hopefully the smaller (if they still exist) cable companies will go for this first, forcing the big guys too, so as to offer something "better" than that no-name competition down the street.
maybe
There's much handwaving on the Rainmaker site. The big claimed advantage of this approach is that it has greater immunity to impulse noise. That's nice, but is that really the limiting factor on data rate now?
Cable Systems have the wrong network topology to become the long term solution to the requirements of a broadband society.
They are rings and as such will always suffer from the contention being too close to the customer, leeches will always have a very negative impact.
Star based solutions such as xDSL offer much between solution. The bandwidth becomes more dedicated and contention is moved up stream, where the capacity can be managed in a much more effective way. Over time the 'last mile' is reduced so the xDSL become a bigger pipe, until ultimatly we have a star made from fibre rather than a fibre ring. Everbody wins, consumer, supplier, society.
RAIN MAN TECHNOLOGIES
'500 Channel wavelets... Go back to cable... buy this stuff... Who's on first... "
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Technically you are right. The ISP owns the wires. However, imagine that the phone company would not allow usage of modems on their lines. Actually, you don't have to imagine. At one time ATT allowed only ATT approved equipment attached to their phone network. If ATT's monopoly was not broken up, there would be no Internet.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
You mean like THIS?
I am sure the folks at Rainmaker are extremely accomplished scientists and engineers (Cringley's mistaken remarks about Layer2/Layer3 are no reason to doubt that).
Having said that, there is a wide gap..change that to massive gap between theory and practise. First and foremost, who (i.e, what service revenue) will pay for the headend equipment. Even the most dynamic of companies is not going to invest in technologies if there isnt a good ROI. Leave alone the fact that cable companies are monopolies within their markets with little real incentive to do anything.
We could extend this argument further and talk about the studio infrastructure and the back-bone infrastructure required to produce and transmit so many HDTV channels...but lets stick to the technical aspects. Head-end gear is still relatively doable. The real problem lies in the hundreds and hundreds of amplifiers, repeaters and other devices along the cable plant with nuances of their own
- what frequency spectrum are they able to transmit
- what snr
- what does their spacing have to be
- how clean are the interconnects
- what is the quality of the cable
Im sure these questions are still keeping the Rainmaker folks awake at night.
Slashdot looks deep within my heart and assigns me a number based on the order in which I join
But the should still get a Cringley icon. I recently suggested photos having to do with Dave Letterman and got modded down for it. Because of that evil moderation I won't reproduce the links of the photos, but those willing to do the research will find that they are strangely similar. Dave and "Robert" that is. We don't know his real name do we? Could it be ...... Letterman???? Perhaps twins separated at birth?
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