[BC] OTA TV makes a big jump.

[Robert Meuser]

The way TWC fiber works is the RF spectrum is modulated to light. I 
believe they are going up to a gigahertz or so. That fiber goes to what 
used to be a trunk amplifier and is converted to RF. Depending on the 
density, there may be additional line extenders from the node. 20 years 
ago each node was about 750 potential customers these days it is 
probably under 300. Where I live it is around 90 per node. The remainder 
of the distribution is copper. Basic service is regular NTSC and DTV 
signals while the services requiring a set top box are in QAM cluster 
with some channels getting as little as 1 megabit. A QAM cluster is 
approximately 43 megabits in a 6 MHz channel. That gives them the 
ability to have all those channels. One thing that impacts the design is 
there must be enough free channels available to support on demand. That 
means there is a trade off between node size and on demand availability.

FIOS is quite similar except the fiber comes to your home and is 
converted to RF there but there still is copper to the set top box. And 
the box is a regular cable set top box. They have to do it that way to 
meet FCC cable card requirements.  Fios uses wave division multiplex so 
they do not have to give up TV space for data. They can put 
approximately 3 GHz of bandwidth to each customer.

On 6/20/12 2:00 PM, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
> Curiously, how does this work with fiber?  TWC is supposed to be going thru my neighborhood in the next year or so, I doubt very much they'll be stringing copper.
>
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Charles Ring<w3nu at roadrunner.com>  wrote:
>> Time Warner Cable has a neat monopolist trick to pile up the cash: Here,
>> their franchise requires them to offer "basic cable" for about
>> $20/month. That provides about 20 channels. To get anything more than
>> that, you are forced to go all the way with "digital" with its hundreds
>> of channels and a price over $70/month.