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?
Years ago: /.
http://www.nbtel.nb.ca/
Yes, in New Brunswick, Canada.
I believe this was already discussed on
Bah!
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.
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.
Why would phone companies want to run VoIP over and IP network running over a perfectly good phone network? They already have a perfectly good circuit switched network in place running right up to your house over the same twisted pair copper wire that you are getting your DSL service over.
What would they stand to gain from putting out the money to switch that voice service to be run over an IP being run on the same copper wire, other than adding congestion to their IP networks?
What advantage would adding VoIP to their networks offer to the user, other than increased latency and dropped packets to destroy the sound quality of their phone calls?
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 -%]
From a different angle, soon you'll just have to plug your power supply into a socket and you'll have your internet too.
http://www.homechoice.co.uk/ Been going a couple of years, but not seen any adverts for it recently. Website still seems active however.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Qwest was running tests on services like these, in Phoenix and Denver I believe. Also, there was a start up that tried to sell DSL based VOIP phone lines to small businesses for about $5 a line, they would split a single DSL connection into several phone lines. I don't remember its name, and haven't heard much from them since.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
They give an excellent electric shock.
sulli
RTFJ.
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
Currently the cable companies have the simplest technological solution possible. They just dump a whole wad of RF signal out to all of their customers-- no routing, no really complex hardware sitting out in the field waiting to break down. Almost all of the interesting equipment is in the head-end; once they've put together they're broadcast and sent it out, all of the distribution equipment is relatively dumb; stuff like amps and frequency converters.
It works fine for now, and they're loath to change it. Imagine how much less reliable the cable system would be if there were thousands of unmanned routers/switches scattered throughout your city?
The next upgrade for cable is to start broadcasting video-on-demand over the existing system. Essentially it'll work like your cable modem; you'll be sharing a local loop with a bunch of people, but you'll get one or two customized on-demand channels. This won't save them a dime in bandwidth-- in fact, it'll probably cost them a lot to upgrade their networks to the point where there is enough bandwidth to run this kind of solution (too many houses currently on the local loops.) But they'll do it because people want those services and DSL tech could easily get there first.
www.imagictv.com
I used to work there. Rough times for telco suppliers these days, the technology does work OK though. It has some glitches, but basically, there aren't that many people interested in big capital investments into telecom gear these days.
..don't panic
I've mentioned it before but the local rural phone coops in my area (and that I work for in a round-about way) are doing this. This is the CLEC we are running in Elizabethtown, KY against Verizon/Alltel and Comcast. My phone company is the ILEC in Barren County and their service is very similar.
The only downside to our combined services (Voice/Data/TV) is to get the TV/DSL, you have to be within our ADSL range ~20000'. Inside the towns where the CO's exist is not a problem, but we have to drop a remote DSLAM/Video head every 6 miles to cover, which is both expensive and makes for a slow rollout.
Read my plan to save the Bengals