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TV Over Phone Lines To Arrive In 2005
prostoalex writes "Associated Press says that telecoms have always considered expanding into digital television since the broadband infrastructure is already in place. But now they are putting billions of dollars into actually building such systems. "If everything goes as planned, the telephone industry will be all about television in 2005. TV over your home phone line. TV on your cell phone. Few topics have been as popular this past year among phone companies and their technology partners.""
Big deal. I'm still waiting for fiber to the home. I could care less about television.
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In France, TV over DSL (or ADSL as it is known it France, where it was invented) has existed for almost a year now, and there are several competing offers. My DSL provider also provides a second VOIP telephone along with TV and very fast DSL service.
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Is it just me or is this a case of too little, too late?
My cable provider offers video/data/voice already and at 'decent' prices (barring additional 6% yearly increases). They already specialize in television, their data is currently faster than DSL and the voice is (so far) reliable and indistinguishable from traditional telco.
Still, offering all three can't hurt and hopefully the competition will drive down the costs of both providers . . .
Well, if the telco delivers broadband internet, they get nothing except revenue from sales. Not enough money to worry about.
If the telephone company delivers television, however, that means ADVERTISING REVENUE!
Obviously that is hot stuff!
Thus, the telcos will jump through their assholes getting tv-over-wire to work and cash in on the advertising dollars before the competition does, and the system will go live in a great hurry (at great expense).
WTF are you on about? Seriously, if you are a 'headend technician' you need to learn about something called DSL.
Yes, that's right, this magic thing called DSL uses the frequencies _ABOVE_ 4KHz (normal telephones use up to 4000Hz, not 3000Hz) to provide high speed internet access.
ADSL2 can provide upto 50MBit/sec and ADSL3 (or VDSL2, they don't know what to call it) can provide 100MBit+. Whether people will bother with these is still unknown, especially with Verizon deploying FTTH massively and driving down costs.
But basically, your comment is bollocks. How you got an informative moderation I will never know.
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45 minutes away from the city limits (as opposed to city center) is quite a distance. For comparison, that would put you almost halfway between St. Louis, MO, and Springfield, IL, on I-55. That's at slightly above-legal highway speeds, of course, and since you said "city limits" I'm not factoring much in the way of traffic, so you can get a pretty fair distance away. Now, if you said you were 45 minutes from downtown St. Louis, I would be more sympathetic. It's not like you're "right outside" the city. You're way out of it.
"I realize that being able to upgrade a few miles of systems for 100k people is more lucrative than upgradeing a dozen miles per 100 people,"
So those 100,000 people should wait for those 100 people to catch up... Seems odd. I mean why? You choose to live out in a rual area. It is one of the trade offs. You also have to go a longer distance to do any sort of shopping, see a profesional play, see a movie, or go to a concert. On the other hand you do not have to deal with congestion and traffic. All things is life are a trade off.
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While I sympathize with your situation, you can't really expect much else. There are many, many people who want & will pay for this service in large cities & (sub)urban areas. Forcing the bells to rollout everything to the rural areas will just put us farther and farther behind. I think we should let the market work itself out. I mean, we've been regulating the telephone industry just like you are suggesting and look at the high-tech nothingness we've gotten out of that.
Think of it a bit like the restaurant business. There aren't Starbucks and Applebees on the corner of Rural Route 100 & County Line Road because they wouldn't make any money. Would it be nice to have a StarBucks out on the back 40? Yes. Is it reasonable? No. It's the same deal with high-speed data connections.
But don't worry, hopefully it won't be too long before this marching behemoth of technology comes out with something that is easily deployable in the rural areas. WiMax or something? But please don't slow down the rest of the nation's progress just be cause you want to both live in the country and download BitTorrents.