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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