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Cisco Patents the Triple Play
Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Cisco was recently granted a patent on a 'system and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premises over a single network.' Sound a lot like 'triple play?' Yes it is. The patent, which was filed back in 2000, describes a system that would allow consumers to receive all of their home services through one service provider instead of two or three. The patent's wording seems broad enough to cover nearly all existing implementations of triple play, and some are worried that Cisco will try to wield the newly granted patent against such providers as AT&T and Comcast. If such a thing were to happen, progress on AT&T's Project Lightspeed could slow even more."
The reason Cisco is patenting this is because they now own Scientific-Atlanta, who are one of a few companies that provide the infrastructure that make it possible for Time Warner, Comcast, et. al. to offer "triple play" or "all in one" or whatever brand name your particular cable operator uses for the combination. If Cisco were to sue someone for using this, it wouldn't be the cable operators - it'd be Motorola or whomever, their competitors who also offer a similar infrastructure.
I'm not exactly sure why the author of the article thinks that they'd sue the cable operators, many of whom use the Scientific-Atlanta technology in question... perhaps he wasn't aware of the link between Cisco and Sci-Atl.. which leads me to question his authority to even speak on the topic in the first place.
Instead of 3 concurrent streams, what about a single datastream.
We call that the network layer.
Converter box or software separates the single datastream back into the 3 (or more) original feeds.
And that would be the transport layer.