Re: Analog Cable Going

Alan F wrote:
> Guy wrote:
>> There's no reason in the world that the cable companies must send a 
>> digital broadcast over the cable as a digital signal. Just as a 
>> converter box converts a digital signal to analog and then sends it to 
>> your set over the coax connector, so too can a cable system do the 
>> conversion at their headquarters and send it as an analog signal from 
>> there to your house.
> 
>  There are very good reasons to go all digital - bandwidth! Each analog
> NTSC channel takes up 6 MHz of bandwidth. In that same frequency space,
> they can insert a digital QAM-256 signal with a 38,4 Mbps data rate
> which can carry 9 to 10 high quality digital SD channels or 2 full
> bandwidth HD channels (or 3 over-compressed HD channels as Comcast has
> started to do).
> 
>  Analog NTSC is a major bandwidth hog. The bandwidth crunch is between
> your house and the head end. With 135 channels available in a typical
> 860 MHz system, a typical cable line-up of 70+ analog channels takes up
> a huge chunk of the available bandwidth. By turning off 10 analog
> channels and replacing them with digital QAM channels, the cable company
> can add 90 SD 480i channels of better picture quality or 20 HD channels
> with 5.1 sound. Analog NTSC has served us well, but its' time has
passed.
> 
>  Alan F


Lessee...  10 channels of low quality service w/o STB or 90 channels of 
decent quality service w/STB...  Ka-ching-ching-ching-ching!  Ladies and 
gentlemen...!  We have a winner at Craps table #3!!


-- 
jer
email reply - I am not a 'ten'