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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."
My ISP, Rogers Communications has all sorts of bandwidth shaping and usage restrictions in place. This is, from what I've read, apparently so they can have the bandwidth available for their VoIP and on-demand streaming TV services.
They need to get their act together or they'll start to lose customers. They have a 60 GB/month usage limit. What good is a 8 Mbit/s line when you can hit your bandwidth cap in a single day?
"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.
Do you hear that?
It's the sound of tens of thousands of dollars in new bribes starting the march to Congress to make sure that our taxes pay for these upgrades while the cablecos continue to act as if they own the infrastructure.
Why just tens of thousands? Congress is notoriously cheap the best government money can buy at the best prices too!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Remember when cablemodems were first rolled out? About one megabit speed, when everyone else was on 56k dialup, and we sat and watched and waited for the cable companies to roll out. ISDN was king, and DSL was something hard to get.
Now? Cablemodem access is pretty much everywhere, and download speeds are pretty decent in general. DSL and Cable both have offerings in the 4-6mbit range, and now there is something else to look forward to...
Fiber. Downtown San Francisco has some of that Verizon fiber available in limited areas, and the access download speeds get into the 60-100mbit range. Let me say that again, since I'm sure a lot of people are going to say "he said WHAT?"
100 megabits. downlink. speed.
Yes, there are still some non-sensical "can't host a server" issues. Yes, uplink speeds are artificially asymmetrical (~60mb down, about 1mbit up. Still an improvement over cablemodem service speeds.) It's part of an experimental rollout, and hard to get installed. So was DSL, once.
HDTV, phone, internet access, 'digital radio', and more on a single line, all for around $100/month, at least for now.
Cable companies have something to worry about. Definately.
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
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.
What pisses me off is I'm paying $45 a month for Road Runner PLUS a $10 a month penalty for not subscribing to cable TV. So after adding taxes, my RR bill is $57 a month. That's BS..
And they keep flooding my snailmail box with flyers trying to get me to sign up for digital TV, voip and RR for the low, low price of $120 a month + taxes, so figure $130 a month. No thanks. Don't want it or need it.
I just want internet only. I have a cell phone and TV sucks.
As for RR here, the speed is decent, it's stable and dependable and they've never jacked me around like SBC did on DSL. I'll do without before I ever do business with SBC so I'm stuck with RR..
I wouldn't mind paying what I pay if they would up the speed. I hear some places in the US are getting 3x to 4x the speed I get for half the price. WTF??? Bump up our speed or cut our bills you cheap bastards!
Translation of the original article:
"Industry controlled 'research' group claims big bills to be paid for infrastucture that video-streaming websites will push out. WEe need to be able to charge Google and other to 'prioritise' their traffic or we won't have enough money. Net Neutrality is therefore a bad thing"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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
http://muniwireless.com/community/10238 /_ F.shtml
http://saveaccess.org/node/288
http://www.newnetworks.com/scandalquotes.htm
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/123400026707348
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240
Satellite? You want to add half a second minimum of latency to everything that you do?
Or do you want them to put LEO satellites into orbit and maintain them and launch new ones and have a huge switching network that would cost them nearly as much as just laying new cable with much more headache?
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)
Ars Technica already has posted a follow-up to the original story that says this isn't actually needed.
Because Verizon isn't a renamed Bell Atlantic?
Why do they need satellites?
Because they're so big and bloated that it would be almost weird for them not to have a number of moons?
That's a good question, though. You can already get satellite internet if you really want it, but it's expensive, relatively slow, and has high latency, given the distance of the satellite. Why would anybody who has other high-speed options actually want satellite internet?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
Of course the phone company told you it was good. They're the freak'n provider. What were you expecting "Oh, Mr. Johnson, that's really slow. We're providing some really crappy service aren't we?" they don't want to be held to any kind of standard for service, so they aren't going to agree with any notion there's a problem if you'll go with their answers.
And they'll be able to start charging everyone per TV for their services. Which is why they really want to get rid of analog cable. They're like Ma Bell in the 50's wanting to charge you per phone in your house regardless of how many actual phone lines you have. The only reason that was undone was the availablity of wiring for do-it-yourself extensions and the analog nature of the PSTN making it hard to track how many phones a person had.
Plus, the external converter has the added bonus of making it hard to do automated VCR recordings of shows while you're away from home (hello, DVR rental fee!).
Why does nobody recognise digital cable for what it is; an excuse to roll back fair use and home recording rights, and find another way to nickel and dime the consumer?
Until there's legislation passed removing the encryption from cable (so makers of stand alone DVR's and VCR's can integrate digital tuners in their products) or requiring cablecos to provide as many boxes as a customer needs free of charge this will continue.
They need satellites because, contrary to popular belief, television *broadcasts* from content providers aren't delivered by *magic*. They are sucked down to each local cable branch via satellite dishes. I worked on a buildup of a provider headend before and they had a small satellite farm there just for receiving multiple broadcasts which they planned on sending out via a new fiber network.
;)
Your local news stations also use satellites to deliver live television broadcasts from various places. For everything else, they use tubes.