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Intermixing Cable TV and Internet Service?
AlphaSys asks: "I live in a small apartment community in the Southeast US. Broadband offerings are great in the area (both xDSL and cable). But the management company for the complex has their own 'cable' system in place by which they distribute programming from their satellite system to the residents. The rental agreement forbids anyone from getting cable service from any other provider (except DirecTV, etc.), which also negates our getting cable internet from anywhere, limiting us only to DSL. Here's where I'm going with this: is there any way the front office folk could get broadband service (T1 or fractional) which they could (via a router and multiplexer) then send down the wire with the regular TV signal like cable companies do? I work in networking but have no knowledge of how cable companies roll the two signals together or how you split it out at the customer end -- I just do Cat5/e/6 and fiber but I want to know if these guys can use their existing wire for this. I've searched Slashdot and googled my eyes out but I really can't find any pertinent information on how something like this is done. Does anyone have any information on how something like this is done?"
It is fairly easy to implement what you are asking. What you would need is a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) - like a Cisco UBR, ARRIS CMTS1500, Cadant C4, etc. - and feed your internet connection through it. Essentially, a CMTS is an Ethernet to Coax gateway. The T1 would be terminated at the apartment with a router, and the router would feed the CMTS. Then, you would essentially splice the Coax feed from the CMTS into the Satellite feed serving the apartment units. By setting the CMTS to operate in an open frequency band not used by the satellite feed, the Cable Modems should be able to register with the CMTS without much difficulty.
I wonder if the satellite company knows they are redistributing their signal?
Something tells me I should be moderating this as troll, but I'll respond since I don't have the points.
You've probally never lived in suburiba if you are asking this question. Many of the "condo" type aprtment complexs have this setup. They have several big dishes on the complex, converters and multiplexers in a room somewhere, and they provide cable TV to the whole complex. The cost is usually built in to your rent, and it includes a limited number of channels compared to your local analog cable service. Although it does usually include a Movie channel or two.
They have contracts with the networks/satalite people to do this, and it is very wide spread.
I live in an apartment community and they're about to roll out cable internet on their own private cable system real soon now. I have my standard DOCSIS cable modem and I'm just waiting for them to flip the switch, so to speak.
The only reason they would need a CMTS is if they wanted to get their own OC3 or DS3 or whatever and provide their own access. The poster simply wants to get cable internet from the local cable company. This cable company may be willing to feed them the DOCSIS portion of the cable spectrum, which the apartment complex could then do a reverse split into their own system.
The only problem with this scenario is that most PCOs (private cable operators) use the bare minimum amount of amplification needed for a decent signal and don't control signal leakage well. This means that the signal strength an carrier to noise ratio in the apartment may be insufficient. But this would be a problem whether or not the PCO installed their own CMTS.
-Alison
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DHCP
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TFTP serving config files
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timed using UDP (some modems won't work unless they have a time server)
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syslogd accepting network messages (some modems want to report problems)
Some custom software did the routing since we wanted not-quite-normal behavior. The same box was visible on the DOCSIS subnet and provided Samba file-sharing and print services. All on a laptop with a 120 MHz Pentium and 16 MB of memory!