As an IP Engineer, this prediction of the death of CATV is ridiculous and isn't happening anytime soon, the pipes required are already enormous, the switching demands are exponential. It requires massive data transit out to remote content caches like Akamai to regionalize the data, but the issue is individual IP access to each location.
Imagine a single broadcast qam channel of 38.8Mbps, or a single Netflix video playing in full HD at around 7Mbps. If anyone at anytime, can request a video the traffic volume quickly becomes mind boggling. A 100 Unit apartment would consume 700 Megabits per Second, nearly a full Gigabit for one apartment building! Most providers are now using 10Gigabit per second feeds in the core, but take 10,000 users thats 70 Gigabits per second, now find me a switch, or a content box that is capable of that and provide that bandwidth out to the remotes and to the broadcaster! It may only be a matter of time, but as Verizon FIOS found out, trying to switch TV over PON is nearly impossible. The only way it works is.. Broadcast. Instead of 10,000 users using 7Mbps to watch one channel at 70 Gigabits per second, we are back to one 7Mbps multicast stream, or 1gigabit per second of constantly streaming multicast (for all those 1Ghz systems). I guess if you want to watch hulu or youtube in a small box and not on your bigscreen in high def you can save some pipe..
Funny thing is, we still need wire to get it to the customer, so where exactly is the cable company going? CATV is the best last mile distribution technology available, optical is still a nightmare and extremely costly. The hybrid fiber/coax network will be here for a long time, whether we broadcast video, or supply content via IP, and IP is not free people!!! FYI, a 1 Gigabit per second Internet feed from our location to the a major provider is $12,000/mo (this is to the head end) divide that by 100 users consuming 7mbps and well $59/mo does not pencil to $12,000...
Here is a link to one of the largest Internet packet exchanges on the west coast, http://www.seattleix.net/agg.htm currently it is only hitting around 100 Gigabits per second and 4.5 MILLION packets per second, we will need 1,000's more like this in nearly every city to support this supposed elimination of copper. Next your going to tell me this will all be on your cell phone hahahahaha..
All of these 4G towers have NO BANDWIDTH, they are just now getting 100mb links to a tower, some finally with 1gb... This is why your 4g cell phone performs like 128k edge device.. duh..
So, for the next 20 years or so, we'll need cable, and lineman, and the business model, maybe we won't carry tv and it will all go satellite, but somehow they need the data and copper transport.
Re: Catv
Member #: 86349
Registered: 2/22/2012
Posted:
41
Name:
Ray
Company:
San Juan cable
Occupation:
Computer Network Engineer
Location:
Bellingham Washington
Personal:
