FiOS Not Hurting Cablevision...Yet > Most users could care less about infrastructure type

Most users could care less about infrastructure type

EXACTLY! Customers do not care how there television, phone, internet, water, gas or any other service... gets delivered to there home. Some people may be a little curios, and those in the field like myself or the geeky ones may care, but most just do not care how the company does it.

Deliver RELIABLE service. That is the main thing.

Fast internet, well, not really. Most people just care it is fast enough things do not take forever.

Phone... just be reliable and cheap.

Television... provide the channels people want and CHEAP.

Cheap, reliable, fast services. If it is not reliable then they have to call in and ALL customer service sucks, Americans have come to accept that. In many cases people would rather switch then call in more than a few times, if there is an option.

So Fios means squat. It means the same as hybrid fiber coax systems or BPON or any other words that mean nothing to them.

Just provide good reliable services at a comparable cost that the person can afford.

reply to fAcEtIOUs
Oh, I hate to say this. Tk has a point on this one. Even I do not care what method HSI(etc) gets delivered and I am a long term fan of fiber. As long as it is cheap, fast, and reliable (all in relative terms) people will be happy.

Elsewhere in the thread someone mentions greater loss of subs in Q308 than Q307, I think that MAY be due to the economy. The vast majority of the public (at least here) has been trying to cut costs(in a serious way) for the last 6 months. Some becuase they had to right then but many more becuase they are concerned about the future.

reply to fAcEtIOUs
I agree. Its typically:

1. Is it available (duh) and competitve on price
2. Do I have any service issues (i.e. bad picture, outages, billing)
3. Does it have what I want I.e. HD channels that 'I' want. Do I have to have an STB/TV or just plain cable for my 'other' sets? Triple play ?

When I originally had the ability to sign up where I am, Comcast did not offer VoIP, and their Internet was $42+$3 (with $60 TV) or $ $57 standalone. AT&T was $29, but required POTS (which I needed anyways).

Now its the other way.
TWC offers $45 HSI standalone, and offers VoIP bundles
AT&T charges $40 for 3Mbps standalone... AT&T does not offer VoIP in most of California.
AT&T makes ordering a consistent package a chore.
Eg. DSL, DSL+POTS, DSL+POTS+Satellite, UverseTV+VDSL, UverseTV+VDSL+POTS
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Canada = Hollywood North

reply to keyboard5684

Just like Fios it depends. If someone runs into a telephone pole with your fiber on it and it breaks, it goes down. Same with cable, fiber could break as well.

There are so many factors that make up statistics on reliability. Passive splitters, they have the same exact failure rate as a cable tap. If a cable plant is put together correctly that failure rate is even less. A tap should never be full of water but it happens when sloppy cable maintenance happens, seals are not... sealed!

I do not think there is enough data to say which one is more reliable. I have never, ever, had an outage of my fiber run (I have a fiber run to my house). I also have never had an outage of the cable internet connection. I designed the cable internet system so I got a fiber drop AND a coax drop independent of each other, fiber goes straight out and coax goes to headend (who would not take that option if they could). So in my experience, if it is well designed and maintained, it will not fail.

The coax plants are very forgiving. There is a lot of room for attenuation (like the water would certainly cause) and other problems. Fiber, there is no room for error. Since fiber is new, it will just be a matter of time before we see what will fail and where. My guess is the passive splitters but it could be anything really.

An ONT is an ONT. Fios has a 1 to 32 ratio per strand. I simply do not understand your other comparisons of ratios.

A tap can be repaired without taking out everyone else. It should have just taken out maybe the 8 subs on the tap. Who knows, maybe you polled the entire block to see if there services was out?

Removing a tap from the hardline certainly will take out everyone else downstream from that since the cable is physically disconnected. The last time Comcast came through here replacing all the taps the cable was up and down all day long and into the next day. Not sure you really understand how this all works, or you're just being coy.

FiOS is 1 to 32 just like patcat88 said, and cable hangs anywhere from 100 to 500 or more houses on a single HFC 'node'. That topology is bandwidth limited due to the severely asymmetrical nature of the HFC network. Fiber does not suffer from that limitation. Coming back to your statement above, one failed tap can indeed affect every customer downstream, which could number in the hundreds, because in most cases the hardline passes through the tap. A passive fiber splitter failure would take out a much smaller number of customers.

As for coaxial cable being "forgiving", well, you're entitled to your opinion. But I've never seen a fiber network cited for leakage or failing due to signal ingress from nearby transmitters. Yes, it depends on how well the maintenance is handled, but cable companies are notoriously bad at that.

reply to fAcEtIOUs

reply to fAcEtIOUs
Considering Im personally unhooking dozens of cablevision STB's and cable modems every week, and Im just one technician, I tend to disagree with the title of this thread.

FiOS IS HURTING Cablevision, even if its one lost customer, its still a loss. Now in reality, its not one, its thousands upon thousands of video customers migrating to Fios. These companies are ALL adding TV customers right now only because of the digital transition coming this February. After that, FiOS is going to start rocking the cable companies in adding video customers, especially in NY.

Whoever has stock in Scientific Atlanta, SELL SELL SELL lol Cablevision is not making any big orders anytime soon, refurbished STB's for ALL new customers for the next 10 years

reply to RadioDoc
I agree cable companies are horrible at maintaining their plant, and that is generally because of the attitude/pride the employees have of the network.

I guess it is the design of the cable network too. We can pull a tap and there is a secondary bypass, hard to explain, more like a main that goes around that tap. We can pull a tap, like a module, and plug in a new one. If the thing is completely corroded or damaged then it would need to be pulled off but like I said usually the bypass will keep the rest up. Also, if it is that bad, everything downstream of that tap already had problems to begin with.

Generally I have never seen more than 200 on a node. As far as how many are beyond a tap, maybe 30 max.

It is all about design. Unfortunately what the big guys end up with is a bunch of old crap mixed in with new crap and a lot of un-caring employees doing what they have to just to make it "work". Well this is not the norm of a small network which is what I am dealing with.

You'd be surprised. I've seen (first hand) nodes as small as 100 and as large as 1200. As someone mentioned, the designs and the actual builds run the gamut. Good operators are splitting nodes (physically and logically) like crazy right now getting everything tightened up and ready for FiOS and U-Verse. When they get to 200 homes/node, DOCSIS 3.0, Switched Digital Video and they get analog down to 70 channels, life will be very good indeed. Competition is a wonderful thing.

reply to RadioDoc
As a general rule, taps are not daisy chained like that.