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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (9747)	12/16/2000 10:35:21 AM
From: ftth	Respond to of 12823

Hi Mike, re: "I thought that a single 6 MHz channel was good for only three SDTV signals." The bit rate is variable, and depends on the amount of motion and detail in the frames, and can be tweaked at the encoder. An average bitrate might be in the 2.5 to 3.5MHz area, and I have heard some MSO's claim they can squeeze 16 SDTV streams into a 6MHz channel (probably that was 256QAM). There are lots of statistical games that can be played, but the picture quality suffers below a certain point. There's no definitive number, but it's definitely more than 3 SDTV signals per 6 MHz channel. Subs per hub: that also depends. As an example (and this is just an example, not necessarly average or typical since they don't generally give these numbers out), with an architecture that consists of a ring of primary hubs served by a main headend, there might be 5 primary hubs, each serving 100,000 or more. Each primary hub serves to say 5 secondary hubs that each serve 20,000. Then each secondary hubs serves multiple nodes, say 20, so 1000 homes per node. It seems many MSO's are now tending toward 500-700 homes per node, but this too will vary. The last number I saw in print from Cox was in an interview with Alex Best a few months ago, and I think he said they now average about 650. On you hypothetical ?, nope, more servers doesn't overcome the bandwidth limit. In the above example, they would need to split the secondary hubs to serve fewer homes, and/or fewer homes per node. I tend to think they would be more likely to progressively eliminate analog channels, thereby broadening the available "digital" spectrum to use as they see fit. It's definitely to their advantage to convert people to digital at no charge, and for the same monthly fee as the old service (but they have to convert everybody before they can use it).