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Bandwidth Crunch Looms for Cable Companies
coax4life writes "While Verizon and AT&T lay fiber, cable companies are looking at a huge bandwidth crunch according to a new report. Increased demand for high-def programming on the TV side and faster download speeds on the ISP side of the business will leave cable companies in a rough spot — after spending over $100 billion in the last decade on infrastructure improvements. Jumping on the fiber bandwagon may help. 'Upgrading to a fiber infrastructure is a much more expensive proposition, and one more likely to occur in areas where the cable companies are facing more competition. It can happen, though — several years ago, Comcast's predecessor on the northwest side of Chicago laid fiber on top of its existing coaxial installation. The payoff is good for both cable companies and users, as it can result in more programming choices and faster Internet access.' Moving to switched digital video solutions will also help."
"Really, I swear on this stack of $100 bills, Senator!"
MOST up to date cable systems already use fiber in a "HFC" setup. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial
If they need more bandwidth they just split bigger nodes in to smaller nodes. HFC has no problem growing with the needs of more digital bandwidth.
The only issue with this is when some cable co's try to cut cost by over crowding a node.
I have to return some videotapes...
Do business before someone else does!
e rnment don't find a way to prevent the little guys from making a success of something they are unwilling to do themselves.
I think it's a well-established observation that the larger US companies do everything in their power to avoid changing their business model and practices... this includes immoral and illegal acts as history has shown time and time again.
But someone will see opportunity and find a way to make it happen, and when they do, it will spell an even MORE difficult life for the ones that didn't move fast enough to own the infrastructure that customers demand... that is if the big-bad-existing-companies-with-pull-over-the-gov
One thing that bothers me is how obvious this trend of avoiding "risky behavior" is simply the wrong thing to do in a world of constantly changing and evolving technologies? They can work to slow things down -- this has been shown. But they can't really stop things. But in the end, the more they fight change, the weaker the position they find themselves in when change becomes inevitable.
They just installed a booster (which I could have done), overcharged us for it and the call, and threw their hands up.
Which begs the question, for both you and the parent...why do you continue to pay them for such low quality service? I realize that they might be the only game in town, but they have little or no incentive to improve service if they know that you will give into their high rates and abuse simply because there is nobody else. They are basically saying, "we will continue to rip you off for as long as we feel like providing poor service in your area and you will like it that way".
Don't get me wrong: I think cable TV is a horrible ripoff. (Which is just one of several reasons I don't subscribe.) But the cable companies aren't the bad guys here. That's the media monopolies who've become obsessed with sequestering content and squeezing every penny they can out of it. And when you subscribe to cable, you're feeding that pathology, no matter how much you bitch and moan about it.
... they are running a lot of fiber, but most of it is just to the neighborhoods where they will then run VDSL to each home from remote terminals. With the amount of money the behemoths have, you think they would just run fiber straight to every home and get it over with. Eventually they will have to do it anyways.
It costs a LOT more money to run fiber to every house than it does to just run it to a new box beside the one where the neighborhood copper drops already join a fat cable toward the CO or a local T-carrier concentrator.
A LOT more money.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It still works just fine. My directv only goes out during the worst of thunderstorms.
Gone!
Maybe they just need to increase the bandwidth by speeding up the removal of analog. That analog signal is a pig.
Just make them invest back some percentage of the immense profits they have made by overselling the bandwidth on the lines that were constructed by public funding, something which they should ALREADY had done in the first place.
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Katrina, exploding pipes in New York, a collapsed bridge in Minnesota, power lines that continually fail, outdated oil refineries, on and on. Americans have got to start realizing that our infrastructure has been neglected for 20-30 years and now the cracks are starting to show.
All of this goes back to the Reagan philosophy of "tax cuts good, government bad." People have become so indoctrinated to hate government that we're not putting up the will power or resources to keep our infrastructure first rate. The fools following Milton Friedman somehow thing throwing everything into the hands of private industry would have fixed all of these problems.
I don't know what it will take to wait people up. We've had Enron, rolling blackouts all over the country, and an entire friggin' city swamped by cut-rate dikes bursting (from a hurricane that never even hit the city). Unfortunately, I think the Reagan philosophy is so ingrained that it'll take people waking up one day and noticing that we're not the #1 economy in the world anymore.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I have ZERO sympathy for the cable racketeers. Rates increase at 6 times the rate of inflation. Digital cable looks worse than analog (I know an over-compressed mpeg stream when I see it). The customer service is crap. Their technicians are morons.
Where I am, Comcast likes to screw up their DHCP servers about every 6 weeks, usually on a Sunday. Once, the customer service rep (imagine the George Carlin bit) insists on sending a truck out to check the lines. Tuesday when he showed up, I told him he was on a wild goose chase.
The next time, it took them 68 hours to figure out how to get their DHCP servers to hand out real IP addresses, rather than 192.168.0.* addresses.
I mean seriously, WTF?
When I had Sprint DSL in Vegas I was 3000 feet from the CO (it was great), but had the unfortunate luck of being plugged into a DSLAM that had taken a massive power surge. That I can understand as a source of my woes, but not the fact that it took them well over a year to replace it.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
This is just plain right out SICK! How can this be tolerated? I expect this from Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung, but not to be tolerated with american politicians. Are there are politicians who understand the problem and want to do something about it?
It's insane to make good offers of fast internet connections illegal because competitors don't settle for anything less than 800 % profit margins for low-speed Always-On internet (I don't call it broadband).
"People are stupid. Persons are smart" -- Agent K, MiB.