espaeth
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| reply to Duo Maxwell
Re: Lay FTTH
Unicast-based streaming video actually creates a whole new set of distribution problems.
Existing broadcast TV options are a single feed with many viewers, so your efficiency improves with every additional viewer.
Unicast IP-based streaming video (ala ATT's U-Verse solution) has infrastructure that needs to grow with each and every viewer, and comes with significantly limitations.
Verizon is using FiOS to push traditional broadcast video, delivering QAM signaling on copper coax at the subscriber household fed from the ONT. You can hook up as many TVs as you want, and install DVRs like TiVo or Moxi. There is no limitation on the number of channels you can tune.
ATT U-verse's IP-based delivery, on the other hand, is limited to 2 HD streams per household total. |
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dffg
@comcast.net
| said by espaeth  :ATT U-verse's IP-based delivery, on the other hand, is limited to 2 HD streams per household total. Correct, U-Verse is nothing but a Fancy'd up DSL Line...
And just for heads up, AT&T actually trained their salespeoples to lie to customers to tell them AT&T's infrastructure is pure FIBER. |
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tiger72
SexaT duorP
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clubs: | if you don't include the last mile, then it's true that their infrastructure is fiber.
Time Warner Cable has been doing this kind of advertising (on tv and radio no less) for years. |
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djrobx
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1 edit | reply to espaeth
quote:
Unicast IP-based streaming video (ala ATT's U-Verse solution) has infrastructure that needs to grow with each and every viewer, and comes with significantly limitations.
U-verse TV is not unicast IP. It's multicast IP via IGMPv3. So if every subscriber on the node is watching CBS, CBS only needs to be fed to the node once.
U-verse is currently limited to 2HD and mediocre quality HD video, but we can thank weakly deployed FTTN for that. If they had deployed nodes a little closer for 40mbps per home, they could go up to 4HD easily. Aside from the FTTN induced bandwidth crunch, the IPTV part of the system works brilliantly. One DVR easily records 4 channels at once. Channel changes are lightning fast. And adding HD channels is a non-issue for them.
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Eat Me
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| reply to tiger72
said by tiger72 :if you don't include the last mile, then it's true that their infrastructure is fiber. Time Warner Cable has been doing this kind of advertising (on tv and radio no less) for years. So basically all modern cable systems are "fiber" too.
Difference is that AT&T has somehow gotten the reviewers to classify their service as a "fiber" service when it is FTTN with VDSL as the last few hundred feet. |
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RARPSL
join:1999-12-08
Suffern, NY
| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :Unicast-based streaming video actually creates a whole new set of distribution problems. Existing broadcast TV options are a single feed with many viewers, so your efficiency improves with every additional viewer. Unicast IP-based streaming video (ala ATT's U-Verse solution) has infrastructure that needs to grow with each and every viewer, and comes with significantly limitations. If you make your LAN Network IPv6 (as opposed to the current IPv4 with Network10 addressing used for the STB <--> Headend communication) you can use IPv6 Multicast for the Broadcast Channels and get the same single feed result that you get now. This also gives you the SDV capability that you get for those Broadcast Channels that you only want to send as needed as opposed to the 24/7 availability of the more popular channels. The only time you would need to use Unicast is for VOD type usage (where each STB gets its own private copy of the stream) since the content, unlike Broadcast, is not a synchronized stream. |
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Matt
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| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :Unicast-based streaming video actually creates a whole new set of distribution problems. Existing broadcast TV options are a single feed with many viewers, so your efficiency improves with every additional viewer. Unicast IP-based streaming video (ala ATT's U-Verse solution) has infrastructure that needs to grow with each and every viewer, and comes with significantly limitations. Verizon is using FiOS to push traditional broadcast video, delivering QAM signaling on copper coax at the subscriber household fed from the ONT. You can hook up as many TVs as you want, and install DVRs like TiVo or Moxi. There is no limitation on the number of channels you can tune. ATT U-verse's IP-based delivery, on the other hand, is limited to 2 HD streams per household total. I think your post was a bit disingenuous. While HFC is absolutely a better solution to deliver video, U-Verse is only limited to 2 HD streams because of the bandwidth of the delivery mechanism. It's not a limitation of IP delivery whatsoever.
Expanding upon that, isn't the move to SDV a very similar thing to IPTV? It's a digital stream that is sent on-demand to each STB, rather than being multicasted (or whatever the appropriate cable terminology is) to all customers at all times. |
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espaeth
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| reply to RARPSL
said by RARPSL :If you make your LAN Network IPv6 (as opposed to the current IPv4 with Network10 addressing used for the STB <--> Headend communication) you can use IPv6 Multicast for the Broadcast Channels and get the same single feed result that you get now. This also gives you the SDV capability that you get for those Broadcast Channels that you only want to send as needed as opposed to the 24/7 availability of the more popular channels. The only time you would need to use Unicast is for VOD type usage (where each STB gets its own private copy of the stream) since the content, unlike Broadcast, is not a synchronized stream. Wouldn't it just be easier to use existing SDV hardware and VoD equipment, rather than spending a bunch of money to redevelop something new and end up with the same functional solution? |
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espaeth
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| reply to Matt
said by Matt :I think your post was a bit disingenuous. While HFC is absolutely a better solution to deliver video, U-Verse is only limited to 2 HD streams because of the bandwidth of the delivery mechanism. It's not a limitation of IP delivery whatsoever. U-Verse is a best-case scenario for IPTV. It's all contained with the access vendor's network, delivered over multicast, and still you are limited to more compressed HD feeds than your OTA HD sources.
This article was about Web to TV, or Internet based video. Compared to U-Verse, the scenarios are only going to go downhill because multicast isn't widely supported by Internet carriers, leaving unicast delivery being the only viable Internet delivery option.
said by Matt :Expanding upon that, isn't the move to SDV a very similar thing to IPTV? It's a digital stream that is sent on-demand to each STB, rather than being multicasted (or whatever the appropriate cable terminology is) to all customers at all times. SDV is basically dynamic channel assignment. Rather than broadcasting all channels on the wire at the same time, SDV allows channels to be dynamically added to the broadcast group when requested. SDV and multicast have quite a bit in common. Cable QAM SDV, however, doesn't have the IP framing overhead of multicast, and the hardware used to interface with the cable plant is cheaper to manufacture than equivalent IP network hardware. |
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