AlfredEN
join:2007-08-19
Santa Rosa, CA
| reply to fiberguy
Re: TV isTV
First of all. What makes a CATV provider a CATV provider? Traditionally, the bandwidth they use, and the channel designations that they present.
CATV Franchises were traditionally petitioned for, and / or granted since CATV has traditionally been a purely luxury service.
Now, Here's a rub. For YEARS telco has been seeking to provide video services to their customers. You folks do know this, right? Since ooooooo what was it 1990 or so? the telco companies have been exploring different ways to present video services to residential locations.
Yeah, the technologies they've been trying have bombed, and bombed again. Until Uverse. Now that telco has a viable delivery, people are wanting to either slow down the launch / deployment, or otherwise halt this form of competition. OR they are wanting some of the kickbacks and perks that the CATV companies have been handing out to be allowed to run their service through the cities / counties / etc. Some of the perks that have been granted by cable companies are: fibreoptic runs solely for the use of a particular city, proprietary data over cable services (aka cable modem type service). One city that I know of, as part of a franchise agreement, had the cable company run a fibre optic bundle from their city hall / police department to their corporate vehicle yard just to be able to link a single remote video camera per fibre, so that they could pursue video surveilence of their corporate yard w/o paying the phone company for a data line. The irony of this is that a single fibre was being used per video camera, where one fibre could have been used to link over 50 cameras.
Why do CATV companies have to be regulated? Well, for one they use some of the same frequencies as a couple of trivial (heh) services..... Air Traffic Control, Aeronautical Distress, FAA Crash Alert, Police bands, Fire Response Bands, ummmm.... the list of "trivial" services that they co-habitate with is quite long. It'd be kinda tragically amusing to be getting CATV CH14 on the aircraft radio of an aircraft that was in distress, no? Hey, they'd be getting the cable channel service for free, right? So what if they didn't want it.........
Now, here's an interesting fact that many people are conveniently overlooking. Uverse IS regulated. What?? How is it regulated?? It's not regulated under cable TV franchising and FCC!!!! Well, no, you're right, its not regulated under either of those aspects. It IS regulated under Public Utilities Commissions. The correct venue to pursue regulation of this service, is through the PUC's. Which, I suspect, it's already regulated to some degree by the PUC's.
Alot of the FCC rules and regs that MUST be applied to CATV system plant simply do not apply to video over IP. Yeah, now that CATV systems are USING different aspects of their bandwidth, its now imperative upon them to maintain their systems for their own purposes.
The one regulation that's being applied to CATV that I'm not sure is being voluntarily applied by at & t, is the emergency alert. That's when you get an emergency alert on all stations periodically, usually just a test. Sometimes it's an actual emergency. Amber Alerts are generally broadcast over this feature. Generally the tests are done after 1AM local time.
Personally, by attempting to push Uverse under a franchising license / agreement, its more likely to stall / halt deployment of this service, than to ensure quality. I know of several small communities that were left w/o CATV service because it was not economically viable to install the system plant. I've seen locations that are within 3000 feet in 3 directions of CATV plant, that have such a low house per mile count, that its highly unlikely that they will see CATV service until the local CATV company is just looking to throw $$$$ at some project, just to spend the $$$$ out of the budget. |
batterup
I Can Not Tell A Lie.
Premium
join:2003-02-06
Netcong, NJ
clubs:
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| said by AlfredEN  :The one regulation that's being applied to CATV that I'm not sure is being voluntarily applied by at & t, is the emergency alert. That's when you get an emergency alert on all stations periodically, usually just a test. Sometimes it's an actual emergency. Amber Alerts are generally broadcast over this feature. Generally the tests are done after 1AM local time. That emergency broadcast system is a joke. When we were under attack on 9/11 they remained silent. Just one example of government regulation that costs money and produces nothing. |
