Slashdot Mirror
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?
I'd think that cable companies would love something like this, where they could stream you televison instead of constantly broadcasting it. It would probably save them gazillions of dollars to only send people the programs they want to watch because they would have to spend so much less on getting enough bandwidth. Not only that, but you could decide whether you want to stick commercials into the stream (as they do now) or for you to pay a higher rate. You could pay by the shows you watch, too. But of course, they wouldn't be able to rip people off constantly.