said by Gogo1 :

Bit pointless when only enough decent content is made to fill about five hours (generous) of air time a week across all time slots and all channels. What will they do with the other 33595 TV hours? Reruns? Infomercials?

said by AMDUSER :

If it was me, I would install the Vyyo Inc 3 Ghz spectrum overlay. It would effectively upgrade the cable system to 3 Ghz without having to rebuild the cable systems.

In some areas, Cox is deploying it, »www.cable360.net/ct/news/thewire/22781.html .

That would allow for quite a bit more channel bonding as well.

said by Smokey :

Wasn't Cox talking about deploying that on just a "few select" plant runs? Mainly bushiness areas to bring down the costs to service medium businesses?

said by Gogo1 :

Bit pointless when only enough decent content is made to fill about five hours

said by noneyabidness :

In essence, you sell bandwidth (in conjunction with preconfigured IPTV settings) and give consumers the choice of how they use this bandwidth.

said by Dogfather :

While they're not enforced now there is nothing saying they couldn't in the future.

said by funchords :

"Why is this news? You must stop this non-stop attack against cable. Your pro-telco agenda is so transparent. How much are the twisted-pair-asites paying you?"

said by sirghost :

I got one question for you. How is this article attacking cable and being pro telco?

said by NetAdmin :

Based on all the smilies at the end of the post, I think that was sarcasm.

said by funchords :

-- yep. Our friend Karl gets unfairly bashed pretty good by some who think he's shilling for the Telco industry.

said by kfsutops :

Of Course there is no bandwidth crunch. Nobody really believed that did they?

said by tschmidt :

The "bandwidth crunch" is pretty much limited to the First-Mile access network.

Both ADSL and DOCSIS have some pretty severe constraints.

/tom

said by joako :

How does ADSL have "severe constraints" in the last mile?

said by Ulmo :

would actually fix bandwidth concerns for at least the next 5 years, I agree.

When they upgrade their customers to SDV, they ought to throw in H.264 as well (or at least XVID). That way, they can deliver higher quality per cost, or lower cost per quality, or both.

Is this affordable in their market plan? I mean, they only charge a gazillion dollars per month, and this is going to cost them at least a small bunch of money to implement.

Unfortunately, they are content providers, not pipe providers, so there's so much management that is in their hands, that it might be too much, if you get their utility.

said by cornelius785 :

i'd also like to see a more modern and efficient source encoding scheme, but you have to make sure the cable boxes are capable of decoding the compressed video stream. i have a feeling that the cable industry is going to be changing a lot over the next few years. there are all sorts of new encoding schemes now, cablecard similar technologies, network infrastructure upgrades, and probably others. i suppose the same can be said for the telcos. could be an interesting several years ahead.

said by pnh102 :

Great. Cox is investing in yesterday's technology. Why bother increasing the number of SD channels at all when HD programming can more easily be crappified to be viewable on any SD television?

Is Cox going to invest more money in horse and buggy technology too?

said by iansltx :

If you look at it, technically they shouldn't have a bandwidth crunch at all right now; their caps top out at 75 GB/month! Granted, they're lax about enforcing those caps, but really, the ope is that they'll at least increase caps to Comcast levels when they do upgrade the network. Also, wonder what "affordable" means in the context of a 25 Mbps connection. $63-ish per month with cable like Comcast's new D3 22/5 tier? What will be the upload speed? Honestly I'd much rather have a 15 Mbps symmetric connection than 25/2 or 25/5. 20/20 (like FiOS) would be better, but that's about the extent of the bandwidth I'd want Too bad cable can't do it without upstream channel bonding...something Comcast has elected not to do yet.

said by iansltx :

If you look at it, technically they shouldn't have a bandwidth crunch at all right now;

said by jester121 :

There's nothing in today's technology that is going to be relevant 10 years from now, and any exec who think so is incompetent.

said by jester121 :

There's nothing in today's technology that is going to be relevant 10 years from now, and any exec who think so is incompetent.

Recall that 10 years ago, AOL dialup was still the major player in "internet" service, and very few even had cable internet. DSL was just beginning to come onto the scene with 768/128 being the norm. My Blackberry today has more processing power (and far more storage) than my PC did 10 years ago.

Technological advancements generally don't scale in a linear fashion either, so I hardly expect things to slow down.