Re: Comcast and 8VSB

On Fri, 9 May 2008 06:09:24 -0400 TheWebJunkie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
|> "Comcast has a knowledgeable member of a technical 
|>staff who answers the phone??"
| 
| No.  He is a technical supervisor I ran into who told me that he
| attended the planning meetings.
| 
| The conversation began when I asked him when Comcast would be suspending
| analog delivery in my area.  He replied that the FCC required that it be
| done in February.  I then spent five minutes arguing that the mandate
| did not apply to Comcast; that their only mandate was to continue to
| provide analog of the local broadcast stations until 2012.  He said that
| Comcast had decided to make their schedule consistent with the
| over-the-air changeover.
| 
| We then discussed converters.  He said that I could either get a Comcast
| box *or* one of the government-subsidized ones.  I argued that the
| subsidized boxes were 8VSB only.  That is when he told me of Comcast's
| plan to make their service compatible with the boxes by feeding the
| broadcast stations in 8VSB instead of in clear QAM.
| 
| I argued that I knew it was in Comcast's best interest to *remain*
| QAM-only because it allowed for twice the bandwidth of 8VSB.
| Nevertheless, he said that it was Comcast's mission to become compatible
| due to customer pressure.

What customers have been pressuring for 8VSB?

Personally, I'd have rather seen QAM over the air instead of 8VSB or
COFDM.


| What gave me the impression that he was knowledgeable was that he knew
| the difference betwen QAM and 8VSB, knew that they were incompatible
| with each other, and knew that Comcast digital is *currently* QAM only.
| He also mentioned that Comcast had decided to honor Cable Card
| technology, and *is* currently issuing Cable cards as an option for
| their proprietary boxes to receive encrypted QAM channels.

Did you find out if the OTA stations carried by 8VSB are going to be
carrying
the _full_ trans****t bit stream from the stations (e.g. for 7 OTA
stations,
that means using 7 slots of 6 MHz each)?  Or are they going to just carry
ONE of the subchannels from each station and pack them into fewer 6 MHz
slots and make it 8VSB compatible?

Also, are they going to duplicate those stations on QAM channels?  If not,
their existing boxes will need to learn to do 8VSB.

It still seems to me they are trying to get customers to go get those
CECBs.
At least the basic tier customers.

One issue is if all the cable companies in the country did this: change
OTA
carriage over to 8VSB and tell their customers to go get a CECB, this
would
end up swamping the coupon program.  I would be LMAO-ing if they did that
:)

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