Hi Frank, thanks for that interesting link re: AlphaStar. Sounds like they've put about as much real implementation thought into their rebirth as they did in their original incarnation.
re:>>Specialized video programming will be developed just for the Internet [fac: you listening to this, DH? This corroborates and is the primary reason behind avoiding all forms of analog on the xtth], Wahba said. AlphaStar has signed agreements with a handful of content companies, including ZeroOneFilms.com Inc., a 24-hour movie streaming service run by Wahba's two filmmaker sons.[??]
Its funny, but the perpetuation of modulated streams (and therefore the need for multiple tuners and receiver circuity, which in turn increases the cost of the subscriber equipment) reared its head again as I was trying to decipher what Clearworks and Optical Solutions Inc. are/may be doing in their systems.
Trying to make such a "native analog" system MORE flexible so that non-standard video programming can transit their networks is clearly more expensive than the true "all digital" approach since the non-standard analog streams now require the receiver have adaptive rather than fixed filters, just to pull in a given component of this "flexible" frequency multiplex. It also means that the frequency multiplex (which makes up the "primary channel") is dynamically sized at the "headend" both in terms of channel bandwidth and channel center frequency, in order to efficiently pack the "primary channel." This has to be communicated to the subscriber equipment so it can dynamically adjust to changes. This is particularly cumbersome if the connections from "headend" to customer are anything but point to point.
With a switched Gbe connection to every customer, you have the dynamic resizing of multiple simultaneous channels at the lowest possible cost. The multiple "receivers" at the customer end in that case amount essentially to queues on the other side of a CPE router. This is the only way really, to make the CPE scalable going forward, so it can handle ANY morphology of content/programming bandwidth. The "analog" approaches are definitely not "scalable and future proof," as the claims go. They'll be fine for the immediate future, but their cost-versus-flexibility tradeoffs will become more apparent as new flavors of programming show up.
As long as this switched Gbe connection is *capable* of handling multiple lambdas in the future (meaning that nothing in the choice of fiber precludes it), it is truly "future proof" in a way that is orders of magnitude more expansive than the analog approach. The last mile infrastructure would--dare I say--*never* become obsolete. Its growth path is in the lambda direction.
This could all be done, starting today with 100Mbe, and scaling the CPE up to Gbe in the future (as better price points are reached), and later perhaps growing further to accommodate multiple lambdas of Gbe. The infrastructure would not be an issue again, and that seems to be the core of the matter from the end consumer perspective.
Chalk one up for good old TDM! |
