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

reply to fAcEtIOUs

Re: Most users could care less about infrastructure type

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.

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.

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

reply to keyboard5684
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 VideoGuy