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| FiOS vs cable, same thing different companies While all are raving about FiOS being better than HFC, the fact is that they are really similar technologies.
Cable could easily be on par with FiOS if they weren't bogged down with all of their legacy analog channels, made the nodes smaller (expensive, but not difficult), expanded to 1GHz and beyond, and deployed MPEG4 compression. Like the DTV transition, if you kill off cable analog, grandma is going to complain that you took away her TV. Not even a free DTA is going to fix that. She's going to say "if it aint broke, don't fix it!!!"
But all of these are baby steps that need to happen, and cable will always play second fiddle to FiOS as long as things remain the way they re.
FiOS' biggest advantage is that it had a clean slate to start with - it killed off most of the analog pretty early and had the opportunity to spread out its TV channels in the full 860MHz or so that cable MSOs use today.
On the TV side it is the same as cable, same standards everything.
But I am thankful that FiOS has given the cable monopoly a good wake up call after all of these years. They sorely needed it. | |
| Cable providers who use HFC will always be limited. Those companies have only so much bandwidth that they can toy around with. That's because they have three different services over one line. Since I have FiOS I'm going to use it for my example. FiOS has tv on one wavelength, tv on another, and phone on another. Cable providers have one line which isn't separated.
To other Fiber users(doesnt matter provider) I invite someone to try this test. Try loading Comcast.com and then try Verizon.com and see which comes up first. Verizon's always loaded faster than Comcast. I can claim this because I've done it. | |
| said by Heart :
Cable providers who use HFC will always be limited. Those companies have only so much bandwidth that they can toy around with. That's because they have three different services over one line. Since I have FiOS I'm going to use it for my example. FiOS has tv on one wavelength, tv on another, and phone on another. Cable providers have one line which isn't separated. Cable has different frequencies as well, except that they are radio waves, not light.
The average house drop cable can do up to 3GHz which is plenty of bandwidth for what FiOS offers today, and beyond. In fact what FiOS offers can be done in 1GHz, which cable providers can do today.
For the TV portion, FiOS uses standard cable equipment and standard cable frequencies. FiOS is very similar to HFC, except that you aren't sharing your ONT with your neighbors.
But with PON you are in fact sharing the fiber line with 31 other subscribers, while cable shares it with 500 or so. That doesn't matter with regular cable TV because it's one way.
If cable providers crush the analog and use frequencies above 860MHz for internet access, they will be on par with today's FiOS for the TV portion of the service, and with DOCSIS3 the internet portion as well. TV is a one way medium so there's no bandwidth sharing.
20MBps, even 100MBps service is absolutely doable with cable. 1GBps service without significant reductions in service during peak hours can be done with smaller nodes.
To other Fiber users(doesnt matter provider) I invite someone to try this test. Try loading Comcast.com and then try Verizon.com and see which comes up first. Verizon's always loaded faster than Comcast. I can claim this because I've done it.
That doesn't say anything. Their webservers aren't even on the same network that your connection is on. | |
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