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Phonelines: Not Just For POTS And High-Speed Internet?
EEGeek writes "With the advent of DSL a couple years back (1996 I believe), the capacity of simple twisted pair has gone from just POTS/Analog modems to high-speed internet, and now beyond. Recently the local phone company here released a new service, where you get television over the phoneline. They give you a set-top box, and a dsl modem, and you can surf the web, and watch tv on your television. you can also connect a computer or two for high speed internet. My question is, has anyone heard of any phone companies that have done this already? Have you heard of other interesting technologies over twisted pair, for example VoIP? This new service works really well, I'm extremely impressed with it." I remember being pitched movies-by-phoneline when I ordered DSL a few years ago, but have heard nothing since. Anyone with good or bad things to say about such service?
Years ago: /.
http://www.nbtel.nb.ca/
Yes, in New Brunswick, Canada.
I believe this was already discussed on
Bah!
a local, power-company funded broadband company rolled out fiber across the town, and offers phone, internet and tv in one package. the actual wiring of the house is no different as there is a box in the neighborhood that takes the fiber signal in turns it into coax, and from there another box is attached to the house that splits it again to phone, and tv/internet. internet over a cable modem.
3 in 1 service is nice, and cheeper than getting phone through qwest or some other company and tv/internet from charter or someone.
astound.net if anyone is interested
AT&T was planning on doing this in a big way, building huge amounts of infrastructure for the task. POTS really doesn't have the bandwidth to carry the same number of channels as coax; instead, the line would only be used to carry a few channels, which would be switched at the central office. It would have been a massive video-on-demand service with TiVo-like capabilities.
If I remember correctly, AT&T dropped their plans or put them on ice when the FCC decided cable companies had to allow other ISPs to sell their service over the cable lines. A similar ruling against the new POTS-carrier service would have made the investment unprofitable, and AT&T was waiting to see what would happen.
I had DSL a couple years ago and they offered a video on demand service partnered with blockbuster.
I interrogated the DSL installer dude and he said that the picture looked worse the better the TV you had. He noted that people with better equipment tended to be disappointed.
I'm not suprised. My digital cable stations have annoying visual artifacts and isn't the data rate coming off a DVD in the 1 to 10 Mb/s range? It seems like you'd need mighty DSL to compare to a DVD so I am less inclined to bother with such technologies.
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
The telco that I work for, Ringgold Telephone Company, is deploying video services over coppyer, including video on demand (VOD) right now.
</shameless plug>
I think the nicest feature of these services is VOD. With VOD you'll never have to go to the video store again. I don't know about everyone else, but this will save me a lot of money in late fees. And with VOD you don't loose any of the features of a DVD/VHS tape, you can still pause, fast forward, rewind, etc.
[%- PROCESS life -%]
It's happening today! Qwest has over 60k video subscribers in Phoenix and Denver. Qwest is supporting 3 video streams over a single settop box via VDSL. Up in Canada (Manitoba), MTS will be commercially rolling out video over VDSL in Winnipeg starting early next year. Our platform also supports video over ADSL, with the tradeoff that only 2 streams are supported rather than VDSL's 3 streams, though the reach is 11kft or more as opposed to VDSL's ~4kft from the remote terminal. Many of the independents have expressed interest in the ADSL platform, with SCRTC [this link doesn't work in Mozilla :(] having a few thousand subs online as of today I believe.
Basically the telcos are extremely motivated to find new revenue streams because their lunch (POTS) is being eaten by wireless providers and cable companies offering telephony. Unfortunately this desire is modulated by Wall St. taking an extremely dim view of CapEx spending with the economy in its present state.
83chrise.nuf