19 May 2004
Hybrid Cable TV
Posted by Zane under: News; Technology .
Do all rural areas have access to cable TV? In our case we don’t. You basically have two choices, either a standard antenna or get a satellite dish. So this got me thinking during my morning hour long commute to work today. Couldn’t telephone companies offer a hybrid cable tv service that utilizes the telephone wire already going into most every house hold in the country? It could use the same type connection as DSL does for an internet connection only for “cable tv.”
President Bush wants “every corner” of the U.S. wired for broadband by 2007. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with broadband internet access via cable would come cable TV to rural areas? Now take for example Verizon, BellSouth, SBC, and Qwest all have contracts with EchoStar’s Dish Network or Hughes Electronics’ DirecTV’s to sell and install their services. Next, all telephone companies already offer DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) to their customer.
My question is this: why don’t the telephone companies pair with the TV networks, cable and satellite providers to provide a hybrid “cable tv” service? Look it this way, the phone companies already have a telephone line into most every house hold in the country. So why don’t they utilize their monopoly in that respect and offer/create a DSL like connection that uses a hybrid TiVo/cable box type setup that provides “cable tv” to their customers? I personally think that this is a service with substantial growth, if taken advantage of.
Update: BellSouth To Test Video Service Within Year.
BellSouth Corp. will begin trials of video services over its network within the next 12 months, as the company prepares to fend off cable companies entering its market for telephone service.
“We’ve seen the first skirmishes, but the real competitive battle is going to happen in the next five, six, or eight years,” Bill Smith, BellSouth’s chief technology officer, told Reuters in an interview on Monday. “We believe we need a competitive response to that sooner rather than later.”
Smith’s comments came the same day that Cablevision Systems Corp. cut the cost of its package of cable TV, Internet and phone service to $90 a month, essentially giving away Internet-based phone service.
Such moves have made cable companies the largest threat to the “Baby Bells” such as BellSouth and Verizon Communications Inc. While the largest of the Baby Bells have cut deals to sell discounted satellite television service in an attempt to fight cable companies, many industry analysts and executives believe the Bells will eventually have to sell their own video services.
Smith said BellSouth would use the trials to test how well it can send video signals over copper wires. Unlike Verizon, whose own video plans are based on high-speed fiber optic connections to homes and businesses, BellSouth prefers running fiber optic lines to neighborhoods, then using digital subscriber lines, or DSL, for the last several hundred feet.
While DSL lines have lower data speeds than fiber optics, newer versions can still run three times faster than cable data connections, enough to provide digital video services.
One Comment so far...
Seth Gee Says:
19 May 2004 at 10:32 am.
Uh…I don’t think that would work. The amount of info that is passed through a “cable” connect is a lot more then a standard DSL line can hold. Your quality of TV would be compensated, along with those kewl search features that you get with digital cable. Just my $0.02
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.