Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
To be fair he's not entirely far off. The implication is TV uses a large, and static amount of bandwidth on every cable, even for those many customers who don't have TV. By delivering only the TV channels that are being watched (essentially making all channels "on demand") a huge amount of capacity could be freed up.
Say 75 channels are in use for TV delivery, vs. somewhere around 16 for broadband, no single user is ever going to be watching 75 channels (plus radio) at the same time! So if the point was ever reached that all the current passive splitter cabinets ended up having mini-CMTS' put in them, with dedicated coax to each subscriber, then the vast majority of that coax's capacity would be going to waste delivering traffic that is literally being ignored when it could be used for faster broadband delivery.
Even if we never got close to one node per customer, a node with 50 subs on it are still unlikely to ever get close to consuming all 75 TV channels simultaneously, meaning most of the capacity is *still* going to waste when compared to, e.g. an efficient IP-multicast system.
Personally I'd like for VM to eradicate all broadcast TV channels and re-purpose the spectrum for broadband, because I don't watch TV and want faster internet. But even that wouldn't solve the issue of crippled upstream, since almost all the upstream is already being used for internet services anyway; in fact it'd even further skew the upload/download ratios on offer.
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Yes, this is pretty much what I was getting at - I don't have a great working knowledge of how DOCSIS works apart from the high level aspects, so I wasn't sure if it was actually a feasible option to do an IP-multicast style delivery method or not.