Verizon To Use New Tech With Old Cables

Ant wrote to mention a ZDNet article about a new initive to get modern high-speed net access into homes utilizing old coaxial cable lines. Right now Verizon digs up streets and lays out expensive fiber to get homes online, but new tech may let them accomplish that task for much less hassle and expense. From the article: "Later this year, it plans to use new technology from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) , an industry group that promotes using coaxial cable installed for cable TV to transmit broadband around the home. The organization says that its technology supports speeds up to 270 megabits per second. Because most homes already have coaxial cable installed in several rooms, Verizon can significantly reduce its Fios installation costs by using existing cabling to connect home computers to its broadband service."

Comments

Misleading summary (surprise)

[Tx]

The summary says Right now Verizon digs up streets and lays out expensive fiber to get homes online, but new tech may let them accomplish that task for much less hassle and expense, but the article is talking about using pre-installed coax to connect computers within the home to broadband, it has nothing about getting the broadband to the home.

Re:Misleading summary (surprise)

[grumling]

except that I suspect that most houses are wired with cheap-ass RG-59, which is extremely susceptible to interference.

Well, it should work. 270Mbps is not that much on coax. Television production studios have been runing smpte 259M (component 4:2:2 standard def. video @270Mbps), over '59 coax for years. Granted, it is much better stuff than in your average house, but it is often over much longer distances.

I would guess that the 270Mbps is the raw wire speed and will have a lot of error correction. That and active equalization should keep things in good shape, as long as there aren't any major cable problems, like crappy connectors or kinks that might change the impedence of the coax.

A real article, not the standard ZDnet fluff/press release stuff would be helpful.

Re:Verizon?

[LordNightwalker]

Whoah, hang on... Verizon is offering broadband over plain old coaxial TV cable? Whoopty-frickin-doo! With tech like that, the rumors must be right... Man DID land on the moon last month!

Verizon FiOS Fiber to the home (I have it)

[Anonymous Coward]

I had Cat6 run from the Fiber terminal up to the computer room when I got FiOS installed. The Fiber will still go to the home but the connection will not be Cat6 according to this article. All it states is that instead of running Ethernet they will use the pre-existing Coax lines to make the connection. I plan on getting the Verizon Television (FiOS TV) and have already read that they will use my pre-existing Coax for that connection.

So this article summary is misleading. The fiber is *still* going to the home, it's just that they will not run Ethernet into the home if they don't need to. Instead using the pre-existing Coaxial runs which are already in place.

RT..., oh, never mind

[fm6]

Verizon is offering broadband over plain old coaxial TV cable? Whoopty-frickin-doo!

It's a typical Slashdot sloppy headline, but that's no excuse for not reading the submission. It's not just "broadband", it's at speeds competitive with those of fibre.

Re:RT..., oh, never mind

[giverson]

This isn't even about fiber vs coax, it's about coax vs ethernet. The theory is that the existing coax within the home can be used instead of rolling out new CAT5 like they do now. With this, they still roll out the fiber to the home.

Now: FIOS->New CAT5
With this: FIOS->Existing coax

Re:RT..., oh, never mind

[mejesster]

Wrongish in a nitpicky way. FIOS is FIber Optic Services or something along those lines. Thus any service not based on fiber wouldn't be FIOS. See the wiki page or Verizon's about FiOS page.

Re:RT..., oh, never mind

[giverson]

This service is still based on fiber optics. The fiber optics go to your house. Inside your house it is distributed over coax. This article is about wiring INSIDE THE HOUSE. Therefore it is still FIOS.

Did no one read the article?

Re:Will this anger Time Warner, Comcast, Adelphia?

[OverlordQ]

Um no? Coax in my house is my coax, the cable co doesn't own it. They may own it up to my house, but once it enters the house, it's all mine.

Your cables are your own

[ePhil_One]

If they are going to use in home coaxial isnt it most likely property of the cable co?

This was actually decided by a court case years ago, you own the cables in your house (Hence, Verizon now charges you when there are problem in your home). One question I would have is whether the cable TV and FIOS and live on the same cable, or if this is a way to force adoption of FIOS TV

Verizon has been surprisingly willing to cable up homes accepting FIOS for almost no money, I've been wondering how long that can go on. Then again, they take a durprisingly long view of this stuff.

Man I want FIOS :(

Re:Who owns the existing coaxial cable?

[grumling]

I always thought the cable company owned those lines, and also one of the many reasons why one location is usually never serviced by 2 cable companies.
The cable company owns the cable 1 foot away from the house entrance point. After that, it belongs to the homeowner/landlord. This was decided when the DBS guys started business and some cable companies wanted to block them from using the inside wiring.

Re:I thought they had learned....

[grumling]

http://www.fiber-optics.info/articles/dtv-hdtv.htm

This shows what is possible today with coax. Production studios are shipping uncompressed digital HD over coax all the time (smpte 292m runs at 1.4Gbps), although they are often having to replace connectors and take more care in bending radius. 270Mbps shouldn't be a big deal if the cable is properly terminated and not kinked.

Using UWB, Firewire over Coax is doing 400Mbps

[pH7.0]

"1394 Trade Association and Pulse~LINK To Demonstrate Bi-Directional HDTV Streaming of IEEE 1394 S400 over Coax at the 2006 International CES, Jan. 5-8"

"The HANA exhibit will showcase how Pulse~LINK's CWave -On-Coax and the 1394TA's S400 interface provide a powerful, whole-home distribution capability that can run over pre-existing in-home coax cable AND co-exist with legacy cable and satellite programming. The demonstration will consist of two 1394-enabled CWave(TM) UWB transceivers, one in the Trade Association's booth and another in the Pulse~LINK booth, with splitters and several hundred feet of coax cable between them. 1394 HDTV audio and video will be streamed bi-directionally between the two booths in the HANA suite, showing how coax cable in the home works as a broadband backbone with 400Mbps application layer throughput for seamlessly transporting multiple simultaneous streams of digital content to 1394-equipped devices throughout the home."

http://www.pulselink.net/pr-jan02-2006.html

270 Mbps is hardly "competitive with fiber..."

[msauve]

which can easily go to 640 Gbps (OC-192 [10 Gbps] x 64 DWDM channels). Not even close. Heck, you can do 100 meters of 1 Gbps on twisted pair.

270 Mbps on coax - the OP was correct, Whoopty-frickin-doo!

Re:Will this anger Time Warner, Comcast, Adelphia?

[willpall]

No their lines end at the demarc, which is outside the home. All the coax inside the home is the property of the homeowners.

They're already using this..

[dennism]

I have FiOS service currently -- phone, internet, and TV -- and they are already putting IP over coax. They use it for the video on demand. They have a simple ethernet to coax bridge (made by Motorola) and the cable box then is able to get it's guide data and VOD streams over the internet connection. What I haven't been able to figure out is if the bandwidth used for VOD is taken out of my 15mbit internet bandwidth allocation or if they have some traffic shaping going on for the VOD separately.

I'm not really sure how it's going to be cheaper -- coax isn't that expensive, and they were more than happy to replace the sub-par cabling that MediaOne/AT&T/Comcast had left behind. They even ran more wire inside the house to accommodate the way I wanted to setup things.

Re:They're already using this..

[Lactoso]

Nope, the phone and vid DOES NOT come out of your 15/2, it's separate. There's a good discussion on it here. Cheers, Ed T.

Re:They're already using this..

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy has it right! MOCA is deployed and it is being used exclusively as a customer premises networking technology.

The MOCA dongle is currently external from the ONT but will soon be built in.

The Motorola STB all have built in MOCA networking.

The 15 mbps data connection rate shaped independently of the VOD traffic.

Re:new?

[x2A]

270mbps AROUND the home, not TO the home

Ever heard of CCIR 601?

[tzf]

Here's the funny thing: 270 Mbits over coax has been around since the early 1990's. It was called CCIR601, but then the ITU dissolved the CCIR so the standard is now known as ITU-R BT Rec.601 or some such alphabet soup. It was also called (inaccurately) "D1 video" (D1 is/was a digital video tape format). Since then, the 270 Mbit transport layer has been used for moving MPEG around, which is called DVB-ASI (that's right, as in the European "Digital Video Broadcasting"). ASI stands for Asychronous Serial Interface, and is the common transport for data between MPEG-2 encoders, IPE's, and MUX's at DTV head ends throughout the world. So, the idea that you could move lotsa stuff around at 270 MBits, even on crappy home-installed RG-6, is not rocket science. Making products that can do that CHEAPLY in the HOME is NEWS! (A DTV head end is a $million or 2.)

Re:Oh, you mean THAT Verizon?

[omega9]

(-1, Uninformed)

I switched from Comcast cable modem service to FIOS this past December.

1) Comcast was ~$45/month for 6.6/512k. With FIOS, I splurged and I'm paying $54/month for 30/5. You can, however, stay at $45/month with FIOS and get 15/3. Not to be biased, Comcast is rumored to be increasing their speeds to 16/?? without a price raise, at least around here. But, as a previous reply mentioned, torrents on a 30/5 line are rather sweet.

2) I'm a pure Linux shop at home. The installers had no problem with that. They were more concerned with my Linksys router which I was told has issues with PPPoE at or above 15Mb/sec. They welcomed me to plug it back in, so it wasn't a sales pitch. I eventually found many FIOS forum posts from people experiencing exactly what they described.

3) Their TV service isn't actually available here yet (Comcast stronghold, currently in legislation), but I know from other areas that it isn't IPTV. Their initial test area was somewhere in Texas I believe, and it's interesting to read their reactions to the service, which is extremely good.

Looks like you're wrong on all points. That must suck. A lot.