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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (2371)	5/28/2001 10:47:21 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 24758

Graciella, First, I'm not going to assume that they can do the things they say until I see some trusted corroboration on it. But to answer your question, Coax already offers over 1 GHz of analog bandwidth, which could, if the coax were entirely dedicated to digital transport, support possibly up to 4, 8, maybe 16 Gb/s digital, depending on the modulation scheme employed, along with other distance-related factors. But there are two things working against this from happening. The main reason is that most of the bandwidth is used for analog TV, not digital data. And the second reason, although less pronounced in arguing this point, is that the coax forms a kind of shared bus arrangement out in the field, reducing the available amount of usable capacity for each sub, in an inverse proportionate manner to the number of subscribers on the system. Well, not quite, but some statistical parallel to this, to keep it brief. But getting back to the dominant reason, and stating it another way, the majority of the available 1 GHz (actually, the entire HFC system may be only somewhere between 500 and 750 MHz) is allocated mostly to analog NTSC video. And now, the upper part of the spectrum is allocated to digital STB functions, as well. This leaves only a very small slice of spectrum available for DOCSIS-related cable modem functions. The bandwidth is there, they're just using it the same way they've always used it. For the most part, it's being used for analog TV. FAC