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Cable Industry Needs to Spend Heavily on Upgrades
BlueCup writes "A report from the cable industry's research arm suggests that Cable-television operators require another round of multibillion-dollar network upgrades to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing high-speed Internet hookup business. The conclusions underscore the challenges posed by the rapid growth of broadband video from YouTube and Google, and the looming threat of a planned $20 billion rollout of high-capacity fiber lines by U.S. phone giant Verizon Communications Inc."
like fiber. Verizon is doing fiber. Why cant the cable companies. They already send the data through a fiber cable to the main cable box for the block, whats an extra few hundred feet. (I know this because in Henderson, NV Cox has done this to the neighboorhoods). It may not be done for every city, but there is no reason it cant be. To answer a post above, Satelite is not the answer. Its costly, bandwidth limiting, and has a long delay. I would never get satelite internet and if cable went that route, they would have less internet customers. Imagine playing CS at 500ms pings. ew...dialup all over again.... Fiber is the way to go. Just run some DWDM fiber and life will be good.
The cable operators, for the longest time, have been stagnant, as they never had any competition. They have the local monopoly, and the phone companies could never offer traditional cable television. When DOCSIS cable modems came out, it was a new form of competition - something that was standards based.
Now, the main threat to cable operators is alternative forms of television - satellite and IPTV. The satellite operators don't have to pay the cable operators to broadcast their signals, and the phone companies are also monopolies that are rapidly expanding - FIOS, VDSL - techologies that can deliver more video bandwidth than cable, and still have room left over for lots of data.
In an attempt to try to beat the phone companies to the triple play (television, data, phone), the cable companies sank a lot of money into proprietary digital television systems (Motorola and Scientific Atlanta). The telephone companies have been researching alternate systems, and I figure that they'll be able to beat the cable companies based on cost alone.
Right now, the cable companies are trying to convert to digital cable as quickly as they can - for every analog channel that they move off to digital, they can put in between 5-10 analog channels. This space can then be redeployed for cable modems/EMTAs (for data and phone usage). But, there's a downside to this - every new digital subscriber costs the cable company hundreds of dollars in the form of an expensive PVR (a proprietary PVR that cannot be swapped out because of the proprietary encryption). So, they're screwed either way.
-- Joe
If course, they could also kill two birds with one stone and put cable television on a faster internet.
They are. In buzzword land it's called "triple play". (Data, VoIP, and IPTV.) "Quadruple play" if you add wireless linkage. The overall phenomenon is "The Convergence" - of all forms of communication into a single packet-switched network.
And the wireline services will eat cable's lunch if they don't upgrade. The minimum Cable needs to do is fiber-to-the-curb, after which they can use the coax for the last few feet. Meanwhile the copper pair people are doing the same thing (when they don't run a fiber all the way to the house.) With a shorter run (blocks rather than miles) they can push tens of megabits or better down the copper.
The key is getting enough PRIVATE bandwidth to each house for several video feeds. Then you can switch what gets fed to the house at the curbside router or switch, the central office, or the head end. At that point the settop box or media-center computer becomes a remote control for the distant switching and cable's large-but-shared bandwidth advantage vanishes.
So within the next year or two, as IPTV with video-on-demand deploys among the wireline carriers, cable has to invest in splitting the neighborhoods fine enough to give everybody their own several video streams worth of dedicated bandwidth. Otherwise they can't deliver a version of the video on demand "killer ap" - and it kills them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Lucky you. In Central Florida (and from what I've heard most of Florida and most of Georgia), cable modem is 5MB/sec down, .5 up for the cheap rate.
.5MB down, .1 up and the phone company told us that was remarkably good (of course they advertize it as capable of doing more).
Nobody gets even close to that on DSL. In my area, we can get
Cable really doesn't have much to worry about. It's a lot easier to upgrade and repair cable networks than it is to upgrade and repair fiber, and cable lines can actually handle 100MB from the number of houses they're doing now without much problem.
The issue is that they've got all those pesky analog cable TV channels on there wasting space.
They're slowly phasing out all of the old, nondigital cable boxes and moving everyone over to digital. Once that's done, they'll be far ahead of fiber in terms of getting that last mile in place, and they'll be able to match the speeds fiber is currently offering.
It might cost more, but if I was a betting man, I'd bet more on cable being reliable and maintained over fiber. cable isn't a prototype. We know it works, and we know the network can handle it. Only the switches and the policies need to be changed. Despite the cost of that, I'm pretty sure its still cheaper than all that has to be done to make fiber a reality.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Why is it, that cable companies couldn't just roll out fibre cables to the home? Apologies that I am so naieve. I know it would be a huge investment, but wouldn't it basically cover ever future technology etc. in one? Is the cost that prohibitive? Whatever technology they can dream up within the next 20 years (and beyond) they can transmit over fiber. I mean how long have we had coax?
I'm lucky enough to be served by Cablevision, who has dumped a ton of money in their infrastructure. Sites like Youtube, Google Video, etc. are no problem when you have 15mbps down and 2mbps up (With overhead, etc. it's realistically 13.5 down and 1.5 up to internet, behind a router). It's expensive ($55 a month) but extremely reliable and an excellent service.
One of the reasons I stick with them is they don't traffic shape. They occasionally cap 24/7 bittorrent users (if a user on your node complains). But they don't limit the download and upload ports.
While it took a long time for me to get cable, I think its worth it- Cablevision's network seems future proofed (well, as much as you can be)
Do you hear that? It's the sound of tens of thousands of dollars in new bribes starting the march to Congress....while the cablecos continue to act as if they own the infrastructure.
Don't worry, it is somewhat kept in check by deep-pocket Telco's who want to keep the Cablers down to get a peice of the media pie. Think of it like Hitler and Mousolini being on different sides.......on second thought, don't.
Table-ized A.I.
Does anyone know why, with all the billions Verizon is spending, apartment buildings are "too difficult" for FIOS deployment at this time? I don't know that I want to switch away from my trusty cable modem, but I'd like the competition to spur higher upstream speeds from my cable provider.