Most cable head-ends are designed to drive 10,000 + taps, and are over-designed to handle population (more homes/apartments) as well as more TVs/home. My home has 6 TVs for 2 people (4 bedrooms, Family room, Den, and Workshop).
Yes, the server needs to be located in the local head-end (where the coax tree terminates) as backbones to a central site are too thin/costly (ATM OC12 is the top end backbone and can only do 400 Mbits/s = 135 MPEG2 video streams).
Most high end servers can do 10000 streams, but scale linearly from 500 ... so the initial system would be "depopulated" to offer 500 streams and boards/disks added to gain more blocks of streams and blocks of selections without duplication files. Keep in mind the 500 "active" streams can go to any of the taps until the streams are used up. It is a statistics game. Time will show that during days when everyone is inside (rainstorms, ect ...) there may not be a spare stream to "purchase." This is known as a Video Dial Tone and thus a "Busy Signal" when all lines are in use.
As for CCURs offering, the last time I looked they were at 375 streams of MPEG1 max (half that for MPEG2). Still respectable for mid-range, but cable head ends ..... maybe for introductory service experiments but not full deploy, unless they have a different machine in the works, which is doubtful due to the huge expense. |
