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."

This would not be a problem

If these companies could buy "blood bandwidth" from the mines in Africa.

Re:This would not be a problem

If these companies could buy "blood bandwidth" from the mines in Africa.

The companies did buy blood bandwidth, from the days of ARPANET until the late 90's, but after much public outcry they enacted the Bedminster Process Certification Scheme (BPCS) [wikipedia.org].

The BPCS originated from a meeting of American telephone companies in Bedminster, New Jersey, USA (former home of pre-breakup AT&T) in May 2000. It was enacted in 2003 to assure consumers that by purchasing bandwidth they were not financing war and human rights abuses.

Some say it does not go far enough. For instance, Amnesty International says "[We] welcome the Bedminster Process as an important step to dealing with the problem of conflict bandwidth. But until the bandwidth trade is subject to mandatory, impartial monitoring, there is still no effective guarantee that all conflict bandwidth will be identified and removed from the market."

obligatory Homer Simpson quote

The Internet? Is that thing still around?

Re:obligatory Homer Simpson quote

I heard they have it on computers now.

Honest!

For real this time! Seriously! I mean it!

Re:Honest!

> For real this time! Seriously! I mean it!

"Really, I swear on this stack of $100 bills, Senator!"

It's only fair

That we prevent companies from putting down new technology that competes with cable.

That way everything stays the same.

Re:It's only fair

That we prevent companies from putting down new technology that competes with cable.

That way everything stays the same.

On the other hand, take a look at your Verizon bill lately? How about your cable bill?

If you're like most people, they've gone up pretty dramatically in the last few years. Back in the 1990's, I used to pay $23 a month for phone service and $36 for cable. Now I pay a combined total for cable, phone and internet of $160 per month. That is way above inflation. Before I switched back from Verizon (which sucks for TV in my area), I was actually paying more like $180 per month total.

Yeah, Verizon advertises "$95" a month for their triple play. But you will never pay that. "Sir Charge" is in full effect with them. At least with my cable company, what they quote me is what I pay.

Cablevision in my area also laid down fiber years ago, so Verizon has no advantage. CV's going to switched digital in addition to that; supposedly they're going to have 100 HD channels by the end of the year.

Verizon has always been one of the most hated companies in the Northeast, and it's really saying something when your company's hated more than Cablevision. I swore that I'd never go back to Verizon after they took more than 3 months to get a phone line installed in my last apartment (their excuse was "there are no more lines available" even though the previous tenant had one! They apparently took his line and made a 2 line apartment out of it somewhere, leaving me with nothing for 3 months until they got around to upgrading the box). I apparently forgot about that when I signed up for FiOS, but I remembered it pretty quick when I saw all the audio and video dropouts on the HD channels, then got my first bill. Now I'm out another $100 or so for the overlap in services (last bill from Verizon, first bill from CV).

If this is what we get with competition, then we'd probably be better off without it. Competition in television providers has only resulted in increased rates and a lot of blatantly false advertising.

Re:It's only fair

Some years back I lived in a small rural town that got all TV via cable; mountains blocked access to any broadcast TV. The local cable was horrid with terrible signal, lousy choices and over priced for the few channels we did get. One day the local rural telephone co-op decided to get into the cable TV bizz. They had a fiber line to the regional phone and a dish that could receive TV at the main office. After many trips to the court house for blind dates with the Cable company, they won the right to compete. SUDDENLY the other cable company offered 10 new channels, better signal quality and a lower price. I guess that was what they call synchronicity...couldn't be good old competition...

Is this in PA?

Are you talking about Kutztown, PA? The entire town is fiber with a 68 strand backbone, and 40-something strand branches. I'm on 10-mbit down, 1 (although they give me 2) mbit up, and the fiber also provides TV. $45 a month for internet, $60-something for internet+TV (with premium channels and a sports package of some type. I only got the internet package.) Afterwards, Pennsylvania effectively made towns doing this illegal. Comcast, Service Electric, Verizon, etc. were not happy campers when they were trying to sell 1 mbit/256 kbit internet packages for $60/month. Oh, yeah, and the tech support is top notch. Even the utilities are remote administered from the borough, water, gas, electric - they monitor it all in real time and bundle your services on a single bill that you can have them put on your credit card. You get a single statement in the mail with a breakdown of your utilites, and can write a single check (I just have them charge my card each month). Beautiful system.

More info on slimy attempts to legislate

The real kicker is that the town put in fiber because the telco's couldn't bother. We're out in the corn fields and probably wouldn't be worth the trouble. It's rumored that when the telco found out, it sounded something like, "Oh, what's that... a fiber backbone you say? Payed for with bonds? Breaking even and starting a profit in 7 years? This must be illegal! If not, it should be!"

They were really, really ticked! Here's a snippet from Wired News, it's from late '04 when this whole thing was going down: (FTA @ Public Fiber Tough to Swallow [wired.com]):

...

Kutztown Borough manager James Vettraino said his town's fiber-access project is on schedule to break even after seven years. Vettraino said there are currently 600 customers using data, video and voice services in the community.

"We wanted to have broadband throughout the community as an economic development tool for businesses, and we were not happy with the availability (at the time)," he said.

Vettraino said the incumbent cable TV provider, Service Electric, voiced opposition to the project at several town hall meetings. He said the cable provider also dropped prices to be more competitive in Kutztown while not changing rates in areas where it continues to have a monopoly.

Kutztown was the first community in Pennsylvania to offer fiber to the home for its residents, and a bill in the Pennsylvania House could make it the last. The aim of the Government Competition Against Private Enterprise Act (HB298) is to "protect economic opportunities for private enterprise against unfair competition by government agencies" in services "beyond their government function."

The bill, which was drafted a few months after Kutztown began providing fiber to the home, is a direct result of the threat of competition to cable TV and telecommunications providers, according to Nicholas Giordano, a telecommunications strategist at consulting firm Affinity Group.

Giordano, who previously worked for Pennsylvania's telecommunications department, said that data and video services providers have made it known to state legislators that they do not want to battle with municipalities for market share.

"It shows how threatened they are by that activity (in Kutztown)," he said.

Giordano said small municipalities might encounter difficulties in delivering fiber-based services because "they aren't familiar with managing these kinds of information systems." But he believes communities that are not receiving adequate broadband and cable service from the private sector should be able to fill the void themselves.

"Bandwidth is a necessity for the public good like water or electricity," he said. "You are not going to get a creative society (which) will be the engine of job growth in places where they can't have access to information."

DirecTV

Meanwhile, in satellite TV world, I'm looking forward to the 150 HD channels provided by the new DirecTV satellite.

Satellite, with it's massive downward bandwidth but high latency, is the better TV solution.

Internet is a different animal. Maybe we should kick TV off cable?

Re:DirecTV

It still works just fine. My directv only goes out during the worst of thunderstorms.

not THAT expensive

fiber is not THAT expensive and it's getting cheaper cuz more people want to buy it and lay it places. Plus depending on several factors, can't it be like 100x faster than cable? So in other words, 100 more customers in the same area or 10x more customers with 10x the bandwidth each. I'd freak if they offered 50 megabit connections that are never busy even if every single neighbor got on it at once. So basic math suggests that unless it's 100x more expensive to put in a fiber network than more copper, they'll make a profit by putting it in cuz DUH the demand is there

Too Bad

That's what I pay you $60-$70 a month for. Don't complain to me. In the time I have had my cable internet service (since the first day it was available where I live)... Comcrud has raised rates, capped downloads, slowed speeds, raised rates, had dropouts, raised rates, etc. I really don't care that you are "overwhelmed". Maybe you shouldn't have sold 10k people 5 Mb connections when you only have a total of 500 Mbps of bandwidth. Maybe you shouldn't have lied.

Last week we got a letter in the mail that said that our streets would soon be torn up as AT&T would be replacing our terrible old copper with fiber to the home (our copper is bad, no DSL). We should be able to sign-up for their TV and internet service within about a year (so they say, I'd guess 1.5-2).

Of course, Comcrud has also dropped the quality of our cable TV, added next to no new channels, raised rates, and more. I would guess we'll switch off that too to U-Verse.

Comcrud is already in deep trouble in this area now that they will have actual competition. That alone will cause them big problems. But soon people won't be able to sign-up for their "ultra high speed" internet service so they can download music (which you have to pay for), download movies wicked fast (but you can't, and you probably have to pay for it), and surf at lightning speeds (if they aren't having a random outage)?

Why don't they do like many businesses, and stop selling services they can't provide.

Then again, I'm sure just about other /.er has the same sympathy I do for the lying US broadband industry.

Re:Too Bad

It doesn't /beg/ the question, damn it. It /raises/ it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question [wikipedia.org]

Re:Too Bad

...why do you continue to pay them for such low quality service?

I was thinking the same thing while canceling my Time Warner cable
recently because of consistently crappy service. I was all fired up
to explain why I was canceling as I showed up in person to return the cable
modem as required.

They did not ask why I was canceling as I expected, so I started
to explain. I was cut off mid sentence, they handed me a receipt and
sent me on my merry way.

They don't care. They don't care if you stay or go.
They don't care if their service sucks. They don't care.

But my new DSL works fine, so even though voting with my
dollars has no effect on the cable company's thinking, I
hope the raw economics of their decisions eventually will
remove them from the market.

Re:Too Bad

That's what I pay you $60-$70 a month for.

No, you pay $60+ for all the "bundled" content the content providers force them to buy in order to get the few channels people actually watch.

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.

There are places they don't use fibre?

Ever since the whole bi-directional cable modem thing started, I've always hear it called the HFC network, hybrid fibre-coax. It's fibre up to a point, then goes to coax. I know that's the case here. The university I work for gets a cable feed, but it doesn't come in on coax. It comes in on fibre and is converted to coax on the premises (I've been to the cable termination room where it happens). They may need to build out their fibre networks further, but I think they've been doing that too. I know they've been segmenting the amount of users down further and further. A few years ago your segment was huge, you were in like a /22 subnet. Now it is a /26 and I don't see much traffic at all on mine.

Also I think the discontinuation of analogue will free up a good bit of bandwidth. I mean you have to remember that analogue takes up somewhere in the realm of 500-600MHz on most networks (a channel is 6MHz). Dump that for digital and you've got a whole bunch more available. Our cable network is 1GHz max bandwidth (since those are the splitters they provide) of that the lower portion is all analogue. In the digital portion they get all the analogue channels digitally broadcast (for their DVRs) several HDTV channels, 50 or so pay per view channels, and at least a hundred other digital only channels. More or less, they can do everything they do now in about half their available bandwidth if they axe analogue. That gives a whole lot more bandwidth for new stuff.

You Know..

I don't want to sound too much like a troll here, but do we need that many TV channels- rather than hundreds of TV channels running 24/7 with their average uses being low, but of course having very high peeks on popular shows, we should have on demand services as television. This'd cut down bandwith, put up competition and work well. Of course its a good idea to retain "Recommended veiwing times" and "First Showing Times" to retain seasons with patterns, Example- my family likes House M.D, its on every thursday, for the last 7 weeks we've missed it (thursday isn't a good night) but because at the momenet I can pirate them (I don't see this as immoral as we're doing it in place of just watching it on TV and we're simply viewing the same thing at a different time), as a result I get to see the season I like and don't loose bandwith on preset re-runs, we just watch every wednesday night instead.

We need 2 way cable cards and open digital boxes

even then switched digital video may not help in areas with a lot of uses and people don't want to have to pay for a cable box on each tv that they have.
And the cable co need to give you free cable cards.

This really smells...

Why does this sound like a marketing document that is intended to prepare the groundwork for them starting to "meter" content? Meaning, I am sure that if Google just "pays for their fair share" that everything would be wonderful!

Actually, considering that the net neutrality failed 6 months ago, I would say these companies are quite aggressive on their marketing...

Wait while I warm up

A really, really, tiny violin. Between the cable and telco's the poor thing is taking a real beating.

Having worked for a cable Co. this is BS!

Physically there is no technology that can match a cable company's bandwidth to the house. As far as fiber is concerned Our internal network ran that for all our high speed internal links.Untill we start talking about pulling fiber into your house (Which will be a while; phone companies aren't doing that either in the US) Cable has major physical dvantages over any other currently common technology.
Disclaimer: I wrote software managing the network for the third largest cable company in the US.

That's interesting...

... because in my area, "cable" is fiber into and through the neighborhoods, and only 'cable' from a big box to your house.

Where is this guy from? 1995?

MOST up to date cable systems already use fiber in a "HFC" setup. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial [wikipedia.org]

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.

"improvements"

will leave cable companies in a rough spot -- after spending over $100 billion in the last decade on infrastructure improvements.

Maybe their infrastructure improvements should involve more infrastructure in the network for customers then, and less infrastructure for the CEOs in expensive suburbs of foreign countries.

Oh suck it up and DO BUSINESS!

Do business before someone else does!

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-gove rnment don't find a way to prevent the little guys from making a success of something they are unwilling to do themselves.

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.

Comcast terminating user accounts

Perhaps this is why hundreds of people's internet accounts are being terminated by Comcast. It happened to me in January this year. After researching I've learned of dozens more who are pissed they get one call then are terminated for 12 months. I've been blogging [blogspot.com] about it for several months and have turned my efforts to bringing projects such as Utopia [utopianet.net] fiber to the home. I figure competition will force companies to bring the best product and service possible to consumers. It's pretty obvious Comcast isn't able to handle the increasing demand of it's customers. Especially after hearing how the terminations seems to be increasing.

I've been speaking with my City Council and the Mayor about joining Utopia. 14 cities have already joined and some are nearing completion this summer. With Utopia, if a company goes nuts (like Comcast did), you can simply give them the boot and select a more responsible provider.

Re:Comcast terminating user accounts

I'm a candidate for city council. Could you please correct that link to Utopia so I can read up on it?

Re:Comcast terminating user accounts

I believe that should be www.utopianet.org [utopianet.org].

My heart bleeds

$DAUGHTER just decided to skip getting cable Internet to her apartment because $50/month for a minimum level of service is just insane. Especially since there's a cafe across the street with free wifi and a short walk to her office on campus.

Now, in Japan with ~$20/mo for 100 Mb/s service starts to sound more reasonable.

Anyone wonder why the USA is rapidly dropping below third-world countries?

So 20th Century

Cable is a dead horse. Either its fibre to within 100m or so, (good for at least 1GBit/s, 4-wires) then copper or fibre
all the way. Sand is cheaper than copper, so in the end, fibre wins. The "copper people" say it lasts far a much shorter period of time, due to moisture. Putting 3GHz down cables designed for 1GHz would be a nightmare beyond imagination.

BillSF
       

Solution is very easy and evident

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.

Only in America

There is a shortage of bandwidth. So instead of applying free market principles and auctioning bandwidth to the highest bidder, ISP's seek out the socialist solution and ration the bandwidth between everyone.

      Auctioning the bandwidth would bring in more capital, which could allow for expansion of the infrastructure. But that takes work, effort. Why bother maintaining the building when all you have to do is collect the monthly rent, right?

Amazing how dumb "experts" can be...

Amazingly there was only one intelligent thing said in the whole article. "Digital switching is key" is correct. Whats amazing is that some consulting has the balls to act like $great_prophet when proclaiming it. I mean, its not like Cablelabs hasn't been hard at work on the technologies to address the bandwidth issue. Both DOCSIS 3.0 (http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/specific ations30.html [cablemodem.com]) and Modular CMTS (http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/m-cmts.h tml [cablemodem.com] are designed to address this problem. M-CMTS basically works to divide cable plant into smaller sections by pushing the RF interfaces further out to the edge. This is done by placing fairly dumb/inexpensive edge QAM's out in the plant, these devices encapsulate DOCSIS frames into Gigabit Ethernet to carry them back to a packet processing engine. What this buys the operator is the ability to use fewer RF channels but gain more bandwidth at the cost of having some additional backhaul (to carry the GigE). Now some people might wonder if this consulting company is merely championing an idea that hasn't been developed, but sadly that isn't the case either. Many manufacturers are already producing EQAM's including big hitters like Cisco (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/cable/ps22 09/products_implementation_design_guide_chapter091 86a00807c73c7.html/ [cisco.com]) These same EQAM's also handle switching of digital video so cable companies save on both switched video and normal IP traffic. DOCSIS 3.0 allows for bonding DOCSIS channels to create far more bandwidth, which is likely to be used for business services as well as more rich IP services. Comcast in my area already offers multiple HD on demand channels, for example HBO and Showtime. (http://www.comcast.com/HBOondemand/ [comcast.com] and http://www.tvweek.com/news/2007/03/comcast_launche s_showtime_hdvo.php/ [tvweek.com])

Quite honestly it sounds like the "consultant" needs to do some research.

Fire up the waahmulance

Telecoms firing up the waahmbulance, looking for more government subsidies for their 'struggling' business. Uh yeah, FTTH, didn't we already pay you for that one? Multiple billions?

Comcast

I used to love Comcast. For years I waited for high speed in my town. I only live about sixty miles outside of Chicago in a small town known as Batavia(featured recently on slashdot). In spring of 2003 they finally put the fiber in to run high speed now two things happened right about the same time. First At&t lines were purchased and Comcast put new lines in and also Batavia was considering a tri-city(Geneva, St. Charles, Batavia) fiber system that would provide us with cable, phone, internet with pure fiber to our homes.

When Comcast got wind of that plan they initiated a massive surge to install their system before the town voted on our own. They also ran a slander campaign to make it sound like our system would cost us an arm and a leg to build and if it failed we would foot the bill.

When it came to vote of course our town people voted down on the our municipal system. The funny thing is that if everyone who voted "yes" would of purchased the towns system it would of paid itself off in ten years. Unfortunately, Comcast did a great job at putting their system in at the last moment and slandering the tri-city system.

Now, our quality of service is just horrible. Recently, quite a few people who live around my area(not just my neighborhood) have been complaining of sluggish and slow speeds on Comcast. Personally, it feels like during the day they are dropping packets on us or something. At first I thought it was my network but when my neighbors from around town started to complain I started getting a little suspicious. The cable line outside my house was cut and its been a month and they still haven't serviced it(I did). Some have said thats the root of my slow speeds but this was happening before that happened.

Crunch my ass.

We've been paying for Fibre to the home for YEARS and we've yet to see ONE INCH of it.

All those fuckin' surcharges.

Years, I tell you.

Billions of dollars, I tell you.

Fuck 'em where they breathe.

Crumbling Infrastructure

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 guess this guy never heard of ethernet over HFC

http://www.naradnetworks.com/hardware.html [naradnetworks.com]

Good to at least 100 Mbps symmetrical over a modern cable system.

This makes no sense...

'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.

In areas with more competition, prices are driven lower, and you're less likely to get all the customers available. So why would you want to throw all your money there?

No sympathy for Cable

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.

Cable Cos have been using fibre for years

It is my understanding that cable companies have been using fibre to the cabinet for years, certainly since cable went almost 100% digital, with just the final 100s yards from the cabinet to the customer being copper.

They're learning.....

Costs go up, wail and moan, charge even more than the cost increase, PROFIT!

Costs go down, warn that reduced profits could mean reduced supply, charge more, PROFIT!

Yes, they're learning. From the oil companies. Once you get a good crisis going you can always find excuse to keep it going as long as you can profit from it. You just need to keep redefining the crisis.

Only if there is real competition

The payoff is good for both cable companies and users, as it can result in more programming choices and faster Internet access.

The above statement is true only if there is real competition for cable providers or phone providers. In the example given, Comcast had some form of competition in part of Chicago. I'm sure the price people paid for their high-speed connections reflected that competition.

However, in my area, I have two choices: Comcast or Verizon. In both cases it is impossible to get naked broadband. Not dsl, which can be purchased separately, but true, high speed broadband. Both Comcast and Verizon offer a package deal for over $100/month (not including taxes, surchages, etc) for phone, tv access and broadband.

I don't want all of that. I want just broadband connectivity. "Sorry faceless number. You cannot get what you want. It's either our way or no way."

Thus, unless there is real competition in an area, there is no payoff for the customer, only the provider as they can set just about any rate they want and you have to accept that rate or do without.

Always forgetting about cablevision

I hate how every daming article of the cableindustry always leaves out cablevision. Here in cablevision territory they are competing very well against fios. The normal package was just recently upgraded to 16.5/2, the boost backage the download was uncapped and has a max of what ever the cablemodem supports/and 5 upload. Cablevision also just added vshd,golfhd, and the voom hd networks wich there is maybe 7 or more of them. I dont see cablevision in trouble yet. They are slowly taking analog channels away and replacing them with hd channels. Our internet is at the max of what docisis 2 supports. Then you have all that spectrum abovbe 800mhz wich is not used. Cablecompanies are not in trouble. Just look at cablevision as what cablecompanies can really do.

Analog spectrum

I think these guys underestimate how much bandwidth the cable companies actually have to play with.

Every two analog channels they can free up off of their wires is good for around 25 Mbps of bandwidth. In my area that is worth at least 1.5 Tbps (60 channels * 25 / 2), and that is just the analog channels I know about - it is probably more like the first 80 or 100 analog channels are currently reserved, or almost 3 Tbps.

Once they are allowed to go fully digital (that is, once set top boxes are so cheap they can give them away to existing old-school customers), they will have no bandwidth issues.

A bit overblown?

I don't get what's so special about the 'bandwidth crunch' on cable. Compared to other last mile technologies, it stacks up pretty well. If you try to push the same services over *DSL, you'd come up very short. The only comparable alternative is fiber, and the cost of putting new fibre in the ground is going to be the same whether you are a cable co upgrading from coax or a telco upgrading from copper.

I'd even argue that cable cos are in a better position; the existing coax has loads of bandwidth so if they move the fiber to distribution points closer to the subscribers (e.g., instead of 5000 cable customers hanging off a single fiber node you have 100-200) you gain lots of last mile capacity without having to pull fibre all the way to each customer.

DOCSIS 3.0

So DOCSIS 3.0 is just a pipe dream? K. Just checking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS [wikipedia.org]

Make all video "on demand:" cableco = YouTube 2.0

How to save bandwidth on the last mile: Don't transmit what's not being requested.

Only send a channel down the neighborhood coax if at least one person is watching. If a person is watching on or recording to a non-HD device, only send him the SD version.

I think some video delivery technologies already operate this way.

This does have some nasty side-effects: Channel-surfing isn't "instant" and there are privacy implications since the cable company knows what you are watching.

These concerns can be mitigated by having only the "top 25" or "top 100" channels always broadcasting in full definition, and having the next "top 100" channels broadcasting a non-HD version. Any other channels can broadcast audio, meta-data, and various-levels-of-quality video depending on their ranking. For best results,t he rankings would adjust dynamically by neighborhood and time of day and would include predictive elements.

Using technology like this, there is no technical reason a cable company couldn't be like a YouTube, with live and prerecorded programming available from around the world. It just becomes an issue of delivering the content to the cable company's head-end, negotiating rights, and making payment arrangements. I bet there is a big alumni market for high school sporting events, this is one way to deliver that content to the living room.

FIOS is set to rule!

A week ago I took the plunge from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. It largely was a step backwards (lousy channel guide, no page down (With 800+ channels, that is a huge issue!) etc)... But last night I turn on the DVR and Verizon FIOS came of age. They have a new channel guide beats Comcast, has page down and is just so nice. Comcast actually took 3 channels away from a 1/2 screen channel guide to show you advertising! Did I see a drop in my cable bill? Nope. The FIOS one is FULL SCREEN, and you can filter to only HDTV channels.

I have the 15/2 plan, but for the torrents as of late, have had a hard time matching Comcast. I've gotten impressive speeds, but Comcast seemed to sustain them more. Of course, torrents are not a reliable benchmark method.

Funny thing about the local telco

Long time ago, the local Bell was having a problem making too much money. To cut back on profits to get the government off thier back, they started running fiber to every single subdivision in my area, and we're not talking huge city. There's fiber all around me, all of it neglected and cut up by now. Now the companys are saying it costs too much to do what they were blowing money on before...

so what

sounds like a personal problem to me.

Re:I know I am in the minority...

... 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.

Re:100 Billion ?

For being a executive for a big cable cable company, your not doing your job. Sweden for instance offers 100Mbps fiber connections, cheap. While U.S barely can offer 8Mbps connections over ADSL or Cable, fiber connection isn't even offered far as I know.

mod parent up

very telling post

Re:100 Billion ?

As far as I know, Verizon is the only company that's made a huge bet on broadband by upgrading their whole network to fiber over the past few years. As a result, they've got a tremendous bandwidth advantage on you guys and are rolling out fiber to the home NOW.

Not only does that speed up Internet service, they can offer way more TV-on-demand than the cable companies or, for example, AT&T.

In short, you guys are dead. Your choices now are to play catch-up, or cut prices drastically. That's what happens when you've got your head in the sand. I'd feel some sympathy if I wasn't so p***ed off at my stupid lousy cable provider.