Goober
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join:2000-12-17
Naperville, IL
 ·Comcast
·WOW Internet and C..
1 edit | reply to acadiel
Re: Yeah, if you want to rewire....
said by acadiel  :
I'm sort of curious as to *if* Cable Companies had to share how they would go about it.
DSL is easy - you have one pair of wires that belong to your line from you all the way to the central office. It can be split and the data portion go to a CLEC's DSL service while the voice goes to the ILEC's switch.
Cable - you're on a shared network. You don't have a single cable that goes from you to the head end. You have "nodes".
I suppose they theoretically *could* have a competitor's ISP, but they would have to rewire the whole headend and re-do the nodes. Man, that would probably be a mess.
Of course, Earthlink might just be wanting Cable Companies to resell their service to them at wholesale (and avoid this whole infrastructure mess) and sell it for a profit. Does this sound familiar? Yep... all the Baby bells have been complaining about CLECs buying wholesale UNEs for a long time. The competition and all the rulings recently on line-sharing have seemed to be impending doom for the CLECs. So why would the FCC force cable to share when there has been a tendancy for the FCC to move towards non-line sharing on regular phone networks?
I wrote a patent application for one of the major players in this area several years ago where they taught one way of doing this. I don't know if it issued or whether they even pursued it after the initial filing. But, be assured that companies are working on this solution.
You could probably do a search at the PTO website on issued patents and applications to see what's out there. I'd be willing to bet there's at least a few different ways of doing it, particularly given digital cable and digital cable boxes. |
