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Students Use 802.11g To Save Cable Industry
LiquidFun writes "Business undergraduates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business have written an e-business case for one of their case competitions that describes how to use 802.11g wireless technology to distribute cable content, both interactive and broadcast, throughout the home. They mention features like video-on-demand, cable gaming, etc. and even provide enough of the technical specifications necessary to start believing that this could work. They even make available their PowerPoint presentation that they presented to judges from both Cisco & Deloitte Consulting. I'd say a pretty good job for third-year undergrads."
Lines like these might perk the interest of regulators.
Ryan Fenton
Introduction
This project is a plan to incorporate the three primary uses of the existing nationwide cable network, voice, data and video, into one convenient and easy-to-use package that will satisfy most consumers' communication needs at a
fair price.
The long term goal of this project is to maximize shareholder return by becoming the standard by which both urban and suburban American people access these communications mediums. In the short term, the goal is to maintain and increase existing market share by creating a competitive advantage over competitors with overlapping markets using the existing infrastructure.
Detailed Background of Subject
Much money and time has been invested in setting up the infrastructure for a nationwide, high-speed cable network. However, market share has been fragmented between many competitors. Today, the cable industry is fighting a battle with the satellite TV, high-speed DSL internet access, and telco phone service companies. Most of these competitors are more formidable in size and financial health.
Currently, cable is the only medium that can simultaneously offer all three means of communication whereas every other competitor is only able to offer one or two means of communication using its existing infrastructure. Therefore, the cable infrastructure has enormous potential. Despite the possible marketing alliances between satellite television and internet (dial-up and DSL services) companies to provide all three services in conjunction to the consumer, they are still unable to provide these services through a single infrastructure. However, the virtual bundling of these services offered by cable competitors still poses a threat to existing cable market share.
Detailed Problem Explanation
If the cable industry were to continue in its current ways, it would face high churn and a relatively shrinking customer base. Furthermore, the cable industry would lose its opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Factors that contribute to this problem include:
DSL will continue growing twice as fast as cable modems.
Satellite TV would continue convincing cable customers to switch over with more attractive packages.
Cable would never enter the telephone industry due to the customer being used to their existing regional phone services.
While cable operators can expect steep competition from satellite and telecom vendors, Cable currently is the only network architecture of its kind capable of offering not only digital video, high-speed data, and telephony, but other interactive services such as home networking, remote home security monitoring, video conferencing, interactive TV/games, and others. With millions already invested in cable and plant upgrades, many believe that Cable operators are positioned for success if the right decisions are made.
Cable companies must recognize the fact that their infrastructure already contains large amounts of unused capital. This, in effect, translates into a "free" investment, that is, it can use all this extra bandwidth that it has to offer great services at a very low marginal cost.
Competitors have reduced prices of packages which then, combined with free equipment promotions, free installation promotions, and multi-receivers, are compelling packages that are eating up more market share.
Objectives
We envision...
Using the huge infrastructure and bandwidth muscle to eliminate satellite TV from the urban and suburban areas by adding more content-rich and interactive features beyond the bandwidth that satellite TV is capable of handling.
Delivering cable TV, high-speed internet access, telephone with video conferencing, static-free radio, on-demand games and movies, and more through one single medium. Essentially, the cable line becomes the only link needed between the home and the outside world for all cable subscribers.
Offering a local wireless network within each household by which content is distributed, e
I agree, nice to see the thought and work put into this, but their are some obvious issues.
1st, cable and DLS are equal once within the house. This would not give cable any advantage over DSL.
2nd, this does not affect those who use Satellite because cable is unwilling to service them, not incapable.
3rd, security will not exist. Remember, the demand for hacks will skyrocket once you put it into each house. plus its wireless. Thats just asking to be hacked... Cable companies will have to spend MUCHO $$$ to prevent this on a yearly basis. You know, like they did with the cable box upgrades every 2 years, only much more agressively.
4th, 802.x works nice in a ranch house, but it will not like going through floors. It will loose lots of bandwidth there.
If you ignored competition, I think this would be an excellent idea, but I do not see it as a competitive one.
OpenOffice Impress will open that document just fine.
Incidentally, analog cable channels are 8MHz wide. Not that it's part of this discussion, but DOCSIS cable uses that 8MHz and gets max theoretical peak speeds of 45Mbps. Just for comparison.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Moxi Media Center is an old idea. It was designed to use 802.11a. The only difference is these students switched the .a to the .g...
Why are we supposed to be impressed again?
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
While I can agree with the MPEG decoder (and only certain channels are encoded, vs satallite where are channels are encoded at different rates) the IP address thing is wrong. Essentially every channel is allocated a certain bandwidth on the cable which is then decoded by the receiver. While two way communication can happen, it isn't TCP/IP as we know it.
So while there is bandwidth there to supply it, how are you going to maintain the bandwidth used for Analog channels, plus existing Digital Cable, plus Digital Phone, broadband Internet and these new services without saturation?
I don't have specifics on actually what cable can reasonably carry if it wasn't carrying anything else, but I still see 802.11g not adding a whole lot to the mix.
You also point out something interesting, that TCP/IP again is a cooperative networking solution, with the current incarnation IPv4 not having any native QoS, so not only do you have do drop massive Mbps in each house, but you will have large bandwith on each segment. Current cable technology has everyone going over the same pipe. Sometimes your cable modem gets slow, add in these other "free for all" services and your neighbor down the way watching Porn on 5 TVs knocks off your VoIP service! Fun Fun...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
You are confusing 802.11g with IEEE1394b. 802.11g only runs at 54Mbs, which while still lower than 1394, it is greater than what cable can provide. (Oh... and 1394 isn't wireless yet.)
It speaks of broadcasting channels with UDP whether someone is listening or not. This is impossible. There is over 1gbps of video data alone coming over your cable-TV cable. So that's WAY too much data for 802.11g. 802.11g can only transmit at 27mpbs (each way).
Never underestimate the data capacity of a cheap coaxial cable.
This is the typical psuedo-science breakthrough we see far too often on this "news for nerds" site.
Would it be asking too much for some actual technical editors to filter the articles?
Read again, they say they would broadcast the channels, whether anyone is listening or not. So your neighbor turning on or off their TV makes no difference. It also means that you cannot use TCP, as you cannot broadcast a point-to-point protocol.
This solution is unworkable.
Now, considering the source states that coaxle bandwidth limitation is at 34mbps. If Wireless-G is rating at 54mbps, this means that the the 34 mbps can easily be incapsulated within the 802.11g connection.
.11g is the same.
54Mbps is the fastest possible modulation. To get the real throughput, you also have to take into account stuff like inter-frame pauses, packet header/trailer, etc. The real-world maximum speed is more like 22Mbps when you have good signal strength and there are no hidden nodes, interference or multipath issues.
Stuff to consider: this presentation stated that different uses will be running on different channels - in 802.11b there were 10 channels. I have not researched 802.11g to this extend, but I'll assume it's the same (if not better.) Each channel will be limited to this 54 mbps and therefore can encapsulate 540 mbps data.
802.11b can only use 3 non-interfering channels. That is, channel 1 and 2 interfere with each other. Only 1, 6 and 11 can be used at the same time without interfering.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
The students' proposal was for broadcasting unused, as well as watched, channels over the 802.11g. What you suggest is more sensible, but would require the cable box to act as a smarter server. I was pointing out that the student paper did not address this issue appropriately.
In North America, channels are 6 Mbps wide; 8 Mbps is European-standard, both video and DOCSIS. Digital Cable takes a 6 Mbps channel, runs QAM in it to get about 20 Mbps, and then feeds about ten MPEG streams through it (bit rate of each can be adjusted depending on content).
Real cable is typically a mix of analog and digital channels. Digitizing is costly, so putting analog channels onto digital wireless would take some effort.
802.11b/g is amazing in its variability. Turn on a microwave in the house, and you're in trounble.
So, how do you send video over wireless? My employer (ViXS www.vixs.com) has a solution. Jump on over to www.vixs.com and have a look.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061