CTOs: Bandwidth Will Be There
By Matt Stump -- Multichannel News, 4/10/2006 4:17:00 PM
Atlanta -- Switched digital television, channel bonding and the gradual conversion to an all-digital network will give the cable industry the bandwidth necessary to compete against satellite and telcos, according to chief technology officers of the leading cable companies.
“We treat them seriously, but we have a pretty good platform,” Comcast Corp. CTO Dave Fellows said of phone providers entering the multichannel-video business.
Verizon Communications Inc. is building 860-megahertz plant with fiber-to-the home, but using coaxial cable inside the home, Fellows said. Cable also has plenty of fiber, not just all the way to home. “We are fiber to where it makes money,” he added.
“I think our network is better, and one of the main reasons is because it exists,” said Mike LaJoie, CTO of Time Warner Cable. “We have fiber-rich architectures and we can make surgical investments that anticipate consumer demand.”
LaJoie acknowledged that the telcos “forced us to step up our game in some markets where they have built. But I think competition will be good for the cable industry.”
Cox Communications Inc. CTO Chris Bowick said his company has looked at building FTTH architecture in parts of its New Orleans system that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
“We looked at everything possible and costed it all out and came back to hybrid fiber-cable-coaxial because it is an absolutely extensible architecture for the future,” Bowick said.
While direct-broadcast satellite providers boast that they can offer 1,500 channels, including 500 HD channels, Fellows and LaJoie said cable can match those offerings, depending on how the math is tabulated.
“I have 6,000 channels in Atlanta,” Fellows said, with 5,800 video-on-demand choices and 200 traditional linear channels.
If programmers develop more HD channels, cable will be able to carry them, LaJoie said, because of switched-digital-video architecture.
LaJoie said Time Warner launched switched-digital video in Austin, Texas, and Columbia, S.C., and it will add five or more markets later this year.
“It is really going quite well,” he added. “The numbers are very encouraging” in terms of long-term cost savings, he said, adding, “The network load is the same regardless of the number of programming choices.”
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