Ron, good question: "What am I missing?"?
I guess one needs to be a little bit Machiavellian about these issues, in order to see beyond the obvious. Let me be devious for a moment.
One could hypothesize that the cablecos, in cahoots with CableLabs, were always aware of the possibilities that present themselves today. How do they defend against such an eventuality? By building only the amount of capacity into the model that they think that they themselves will need, and claim that admitting others would be in defiance of nature. Perhaps this could be viewed as an extremely subtle measure, or naively minimalist, or even tacitly acknowledged by them. No one will ever tell.
By giving these kinds of appearances -- even if they only seemed to be doing so in a tacit way -- that the HFC model maxes out with only one provider's services, they effectively thwart off any attempts by others to compete on the same system. Surely, all it would take is using some additional 6MHz channels in the downstream, and squeezing a little bit more tightly in the upstream, if they really wanted to do it. But the MSO's argument here is that the remaining channels are for broadcast grade program services, which argument, itself, is another hallowed precept founded in their book of nature.
It's a matter of setting the correct design parameters in order to meet the desired overall effect, or the engineered goals of the system, and it has to be done from the outset. And the parameters that were set effectively work to this end, if you follow my hypothesis, because they have been working, in this regard, in the cable industry's favor thus far.
It should be kept in mind that these constructs were put in place prior to their (and everyone else's) recent realizations re: the true uptake requirements being manifest by bandwidth consumption.
Can these shortcomings be corrected? Certainly. By designing the new bridges over the East River to a new set of optical parameters, and then finding someone who will be willing to pay for it.
Only hypothesizing, like I said. Comments welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
