AT&T and the Infamous Second HD StreamWill telco resort to 'fake HD'? ( old news - 09:06AM Friday Oct 13 2006) tags: dsl · Video · business · telco · TVIP · HDTVAT&T’s Wes Warnock tells industry analyst Dave Burstein: "our first HD trial customers are up and running in Houston today. We've been very pleased with the picture quality and compression we've seen there. As we've said all along, we will launch our HD offering with a single HD stream. Shortly thereafter, we'll enable a second HD stream. When this happens, customers will be able to use 2 streams of HD and still have 2 SD streams to either watch or record.""The promise of the second HD stream is intriguing," says Burstein. "They cannot deliver two live HD and 2 SD streams + DSL + overhead in 20-25 megabits with current encoders without compromising the quality of the HD video." Customers further than 3,000 feet are going to need more speed than what's going to be available with the original "Project Lightspeed" deployment design, he insists. Warnock says there's two options for them: pair bonding, or "splitting a distribution area in two, which shortens the loop lengths" - an option that would require laying more fiber. "They may therefore choose to cheat, squeezing in two channels of "Fake HD"," says Burstein. As for the rumors we've seen about AT&T deciding to go all fiber, Burstein doesn't think AT&T will spend the money. More detail available over at Burstein's DSLPrime.
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- Wednesday Evening Links
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jjoshua
Premium
join:2001-06-01
Scotch Plains, NJ | TCP/IP is not broadcast It seems silly to me that these folks are trying to replicate a broadcast paradigm using point to point.
Hasn't the wheel already been invented here? | |
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rachelsfx
join:2004-09-27
Pensacola, FL
| Re: TCP/IP is not broadcast If at&t says it'll work, dammit it'll work.
at&t has a strategy, err, ideas, err, stupid ideas. They have the technology, err, possible techno-, err, YES! The NSA on their side.
at&t
Yo r Wo ld. D li e d.
Bloody compression!
-Rach | |
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drmorley
Premium,MVM
join:2000-12-20
Park Ridge, IL
clubs:
| For all the Press... For all the press around Project Lightspeed I've yet to see any real deployment. It's been two years of talk and for what? A couple of towns in Texas now have limited access to the service?
I couldn't be less impressed or excited about Project Lightspeed. Keep your press releases and just let me know when you're dropping fiber. I've got 27 years left on my mortgage so I'll be here...waiting patiently.
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»tehblogs.com | |
| | djeremy
join:2004-07-12
San Francisco, CA | Re: For all the Press... I absolutely agree with you. All this talk and basically no action outside of what, 500 homes in Texas? | |
| | | Biskit
join:2003-02-07
Fenton, MO
| Re: For all the Press... Right, they can just have Jeannie wiggle her nose and poof, all of the equipment and cables are in place. Give it a rest, it takes time and manpower to deploy. In some cases new fiber, new interfaces, conditioning existing pairs. I am not defending them by no means, but the stuff isnt going to magically pop up. | |
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china crisis
join:2003-05-28
| Re: AT&T loves corporate welfare!
"johny, you get off the internet right now!" |
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jinjimbob
Troy Mcclure
join:2001-11-13 | Dish and Directv do it, . . . Dish and DirecTv do it, why can't AT&T change HD into HD-Light?
They wouldn't need HD if they didn't over compress all the SD channels. | |
| | tmc8080
join:2004-04-24
Floral Park, NY
| Re: Dish and Directv do it, . . . Why don't they SEE THE LIGHT-- as in FIBER TO THE HOME??
it MUST be getting marginally cheaper than 2003/2004 days of 3-5k per home passed!
Besides, if I were at&t I'd only deploy in places where franchise rights have been locked up already, and use that as the carrot for other areas.. much like Verizon does. If they want to start small, PICK A FRIGGEN STATE and wire 100% of its territory with fiber, etc.. its not that big a deal, considering the revenue (aka profit) the company rakes in now.. | |
| | haertig
join:2000-12-31
Broomfield, CO
| said by jinjimbob  :They wouldn't need HD if they didn't over compress all the SD channels. Being a Dish customer, I've always wondered about their HD offerings (I only have SD).
Are the Dish compression artifacts supposed to look THAT much better in HD than in SD???!!! I'm thinking that soft blurry SD blotches might actually look better than sharp crisp HD blotches...  | |
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phattieg
join:2001-04-29
Winter Park, FL
 ·Verizon Wireless B..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Hate to say I told ya so, but.... I knew it. This is going to be such a waste of money to begin with. The company might as well deploy fiber, as they are already paying out the wazoo for the RT's. The cost of just going all the way and doing fiber is equal to, if not cheaper, than doing it this way. Totally impractical. The end result will not be worth the customers money. They would be better off servicing the "ineligible" with hybrid satellite/DSL with VoD capabilities. Not only could they benefit by designing the equipment/settop boxes, but they could also benefit by simply doing a contract with a dish vendor, saving them the cost of deploying more equipment other than their settop boxes. Oh well, they make a perfect example of the Vonage logo, "people do stupid things".
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SIPPhone/Gizmo # 17476200648 / PIMPNET Chatline / Ran by Asterisk & Slackware 10.1. | |
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wah-hoo-wah-hoohoo
@lakeheadu.ca | Re: Hate to say I told ya so, but.... ........... get the vonage commercial music going too | |
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NOCMan
Verizon Fios User
Premium
join:2004-09-30
Flower Mound, TX
| I predict If AT&T sticks to this eventually Verizon will have expanded it's fios network as far as it can go. It's quite possible they will begin to overbuild areas they know they can snipe from AT&T.
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FIOS chat »www.fioschat.com MacChatter »www.macchatter.com | |
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imrf
Premium
join:2002-06-06
Utica, MI
 ·WOW Internet and C..
| Re: I predict said by NOCMan :If AT&T sticks to this eventually Verizon will have expanded it's fios network as far as it can go. It's quite possible they will begin to overbuild areas they know they can snipe from AT&T. We can only wish that would happen. I'd love to see this happen. I would then have two cable companies and two phone companies to decide over, instead of one phone company and two cable companies. | |
| | dcs2281
join:2004-09-14
Santa Clarita, CA
| Well, I will have to wait and see on that one. How time passes many forget, Verizon deployed FTTH before in 1998 in a few areas. They ended up selling it off to the CableCo's. They were unable to maintain it and upgrade it due to cost. I realize costs have dropped, but from looking at what they are spending and their return so far, looks like a rehash of what they did before. Lay fiber, wait 2 years, then sell it off. Maybe they learned something from it, maybe they didn't. | |
| amungus
Premium
join:2004-11-26
America
clubs:
| first poster said it best................................... "TCP/IP is not broadcast
It seems silly to me that these folks are trying to replicate a broadcast paradigm using point to point.
Hasn't the wheel already been invented here?"
...yeah, it has, and it's called ANALOG. TV was meant to be broadcasted...
Even digital broadcasting is more well established (than IPTV), not to mention sat. systems......
The only real way to deliver HD is either through existing cable, sat. or ..hmm.. what's that other stuff called? oh yeah.. FIBER.
I've posted it before, I'll post it again, STOP TRYING TO PIPE TELEVISION THROUGH TELEPHONE LINES!!! It's about the dumbest thing I can think of. I mean come on, what's next, trying to pump gas through a hose the size of a straw??? You'd be sitting at the pump for hours.
Telephone lines were invented, and deployed for one reason, and one reason only, telephones. It's almost weird that modulation/demodulation works at all for dialup (and we all know how flaky that is) let alone DSL. Leave the poor ol' little itsy bitsy coper lines alone and leave real television to people who know what they're doing with it. | |
| | sgnese
join:2006-02-12
San Jose, CA | Re: first poster said it best................................... Is it safe to assume you work for cable co??? | |
| | | amungus
Premium
join:2004-11-26
America
clubs: | Re: first poster said it best................................... no, I'm just a computer geek..
but I think cable/sat. co's already know what they're doing with video.
IPTV is a cool idea, don't get me wrong, but I think that to really do HD video across telephone wires is just silly. | |
| Eek2121
join:2002-10-12
Andover, NJ
| I'm no genious but... take a standard quicktime HD 720p trailer. The one used in my example is 110 MB for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. At 700k/sec you can stream that trailer in real time. Keep in mind 700k/sec is only a little under 6 mbit, including overhead, and these trailers are of excellent quality. Quality reduction decreases file size. Cable compromises on quality, so do you really think AT&T won't? They could probably get it to about 5mbit or so quality wise. Either way, completely doable by regular DSL. I remember having a 7/1 DSL connection through a local, independent provider once. I was 9,000 feet from the C/O as well. | |
| cyberbeing
join:2005-02-18
Sacramento, CA | MPEG4-AVC would make this possible If they are using MPEG4-AVC(h.264) and not MPEG2 I don't see why this would be so impossible. Combine that with only transmitting the stations you tune to and it would probably work just fine at broadcast quality. | |
| | DMS1
join:2005-04-06
Carrollton, TX
| Re: MPEG4-AVC would make this possible said by cyberbeing :If they are using MPEG4-AVC(h.264) and not MPEG2 I don't see why this would be so impossible. Combine that with only transmitting the stations you tune to and it would probably work just fine at broadcast quality. It might be just possible using MPEG4 if the HD resolution is 720p. However, this is hardly a future-proof solution. | |
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PolarBear
The bear formerly known as aaron8301
Premium
join:2005-01-03
Riverside, WA
·CableOne
| Sure, you could probably get the video stream down to 5mbps, but remember, that's just the video portion of the signal. What about the internet and phone?
Like someone posted above, someone would be trying to watch tv and it would cut out because someone else in the house was downloading music/movies/porn/whatever on the internet.
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"I invented it, Bill made it famous." --David Bradley, the inventor of Ctrl+Alt+Del. | |
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LilYoda
Feline with squirel personality disorder
Premium
join:2004-09-02
Mountains
| I think that's what IPTV providers do in Europe...
Requires you to have their set top box, or a specific PC player, but they can stream more than 1HD stream,+VoIP+normal internet
The box does the interleaving, QoS, prioritization, etc... And the speeds are between 15 and 20 Mbps (with 1Mbps upload, iirc)
Not that it concerns me, I have 64dB loss on the copper, so I'm stuck at 640/160Kbps
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"the two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." (Harlan Ellison) | |
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KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK | One word.... One word: Wormholes!
(Laff!) | |
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