Cable Industry May Need to Spend
Heavily on Broadband Upgrades
Cable-television operators may require another round of multibillion-dollar network upgrades to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing high-speed Internet hookup business, a report from the industry's research arm suggests.
The article is a public food fight between Cable Labs (an industry-funded research and development consortium) and two CTOs of major cable companies (Time Warner and Comcast). Cable Labs is suggesting that as Verizon rolls out fiber to the premises (FTTP) they will have a bandwidth advantage that will push the cable companies towards also rolling out fiber to the home (a multibillion dollar investment).
The CTOs are saying "bugger off, we won't need fiber." They have a point. By migrating services away from analog, they can free up a great deal of capacity for digital services (TV, data, etc.). That will require that every cable subscriber has a converter box for every tv hooked up to cable. But the technology does exist to make a very low cost, basic, digital-only cable TV box.
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Heavily on Broadband Upgrades
Cable-television operators may require another round of multibillion-dollar network upgrades to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing high-speed Internet hookup business, a report from the industry's research arm suggests.
- mark 8-17-2006 9:56 pm
The article is a public food fight between Cable Labs (an industry-funded research and development consortium) and two CTOs of major cable companies (Time Warner and Comcast). Cable Labs is suggesting that as Verizon rolls out fiber to the premises (FTTP) they will have a bandwidth advantage that will push the cable companies towards also rolling out fiber to the home (a multibillion dollar investment).
The CTOs are saying "bugger off, we won't need fiber." They have a point. By migrating services away from analog, they can free up a great deal of capacity for digital services (TV, data, etc.). That will require that every cable subscriber has a converter box for every tv hooked up to cable. But the technology does exist to make a very low cost, basic, digital-only cable TV box.
- mark 8-18-2006 1:47 am