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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS)

COMS 0.00130

-18.8%

Nov 7 11:47 AM EST

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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (11807)	12/7/1997 2:45:00 AM
From: Bill Martin	Read Replies (2) of 45548

Re: The 75 ohm coax is all that is needed as far as infrastructure. Wrong. A cable system isn't just a coax from the central office running down the street with "tee" taps at each house. It also has to have a system of distribution amplifiers carefully scattered about to repower the signals periodically, keep impedances matched, line levels balanced, etc. You don't want one TV failing and putting 110v on the whole system and destroying every TV in town for example. The fundamental problem is that the old systems were designed with the idea that they were just sending a signal from their office to your house so the distribution amplifiers were one way -- there was no way to get a signal from your house backwards through the amplifier to their office. It's like trying to yell into your loudspeakers and expecting to get sound to come out of your tape deck. Later on the cable companies thought about "pay per view" and decided it would be nifty if your set top box could talk back to the central office. These newer systems were built with bidirectional distribution amplifiers -- though I think they're much slower on the uplink than on the downlink. If your local cable plant was built with the old distribution system, then you don't have the infrastructure necessary for internet access through cable -- though some systems played with skirting the issue by making you use your telephone for the uplink and the cable for the downlink. Big money required to upgrade the entire system. If your cable system was built more recently with bidirectional distribution amplifiers, then it's possible to add internet access without too much grief for the cable company. Hope this explains the why you get different answers from different cable companies. Bill

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