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Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals
Arch-rivals work together on telephony standards
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by James Careless | CommentsIn public, they're arch-rivals, but behind closed doors, Canada's cable and telephone industries are quietly working together, developing standards for local competitive telephone service. The reason they're doing this—in league with other long distance and wireless telephone service providers—is because a regulator has told them to.
Getting ready for cable's digital era
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Roger Brown | CommentsPity the poor cable TV set-top box. For at least the past 10 years, everyone from consumers to legislators have been trying to rid the planet of the devices, but "the box" that resides on top of millions of TVs refuses to go away. They have remained ubiquitous simply because of their utility—first as a way for operators to offer more than 13 channels, then as a method to provide volume co...
In wireless world, hearing is believing
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Tom Robinson | CommentsBoldly, I've even scheduled participation in conference calls, knowing I was going to have to take them on the car phone. Such an arrangement, though, has sometimes, put me in significant distress, for just as I'm about to make the critical point that I hope will win the group over to my side, suddenly, the connection gets filled with static, cross-talk, or worse yet, silence (silence is not go...
Looking through rose-colored binoculars
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Roger Brown | CommentsThe fact of the matter is, no one really knows how many minutes a year the telephone network doesn't work. Or, if anyone knows, they aren't telling. In the course of preparing this month's cover story, it became abundantly clear to me that network reliability is a slippery concept — there are no established guidelines by which to calculate availability figures.
The comet is here; Are you ready to see it?
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Jim Farmer | CommentsFor the rest of our time on earth Tom Bopp spoke first, of how he discovered the comet on July 22, 1995. An amateur astronomer, he had planned a casual evening of stellar observation with a friend at a remote observing point (remoteness is a hazard of the hobby, because city lights are anathema to astronomers).
More style than substance?
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Roger Brown | CommentsIt's every cable operator's nightmare: It's Super Bowl Sunday. Millions of viewers are camped out in front of their TVs. Parties have been organized around what is arguably the premier TV event of the year. Then the cable goes out. A scene like that could cost a cable company dearly in its fight for respectability in the customer service war, undoing several years of efforts to improve network ...
Are Telcos Headed Back to the Future?
February 28, 1997 7:00 pm | by Fred Dawson | CommentsAre the telcos headed back to the future, with fiber-to-the-home turning out to be proving in at about the timeframe originally projected? The answer is yes, says Pacific Bell CEO Dave Dorman. The RBOC chief sees an aggressive fiber-to-the-home strategy taking shape in the telephone industry, with "at least one major telco" planning to deploy all-optical broadband networks in newbuild installat...
Cable moves ahead in high-speed data race
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Fred Dawson | CommentsWhile debate over the technical viability and relative merits of cable modems and telco xDSL rages on, the real question regarding long-term strength of these competing technologies concerns their chances for becoming off-the-shelf components in the retail computer hardware market. The cable industry scored a major success in this direction in early December with preliminary agreement among par...
Clearing out the cobwebs in the attic
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Roger Brown | CommentsWith the bloom off the residential telephony rose, cable engineers are back to pondering the merits of powered drops, power-passing taps and cable telephony systems. Not having to run power down the drop avoids a lot of headaches today, but where does that leave the industry in its quest to offer new services in the future? Should network planners do it anyway? Oddly, the tepid market for cable...
LatestNewYear'sresolution—readmore!
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Walt Ciciora | CommentsSo am I going to suggest you start reading novels and "great literature?" No, not at all. I'm going to sneak up on that proposal and suggest instead that you read material that deals with the history of our industry and related industries and the biographies of some of its pioneers. CED told me I could write about anything I wished.
Grafting WDM onto existing cable systems
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Venk Mutalik, Fiberoptics Engineer, Philips Broadband Networks Inc. | CommentsWith the advent of 1550 nm optically amplified systems, cable companies can now provide a point-to-point link between two headends, as well as provide multi-split options at the receiving headend, thereby reaching the subscriber node without any electrical conversion. This efficient method of information transfer is transparent to system upgrades and best preserves the system CNR.
Gov't regulation and intellectual property
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Jeffrey Krauss, Intellectual Property Developer and President of Telecommunications and Technology Policy | CommentsFor hardware, the intellectual property is an idea or concept or algorithm (such as MPEG-2 compression) and the way that it is embodied or implemented in the hardware, and is usually protected by patents. For video or audio programming and books and magazines, the intellectual property is the programming or publication itself, and is protected by copyrights.
Latest New Year's resolution — read more!
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Walt Ciciora | CommentsSo am I going to suggest you start reading novels and "great literature?" No, not at all. I'm going to sneak up on that proposal and suggest instead that you read material that deals with the history of our industry and related industries and the biographies of some of its pioneers. CED told me I could write about anything I wished.
Consumers, the DVD and copy protection
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Wendell Bailey | CommentsThe DVD can play (and in certain models, record) video on a disk that is the same size and appearance as a CD-ROM. This new device can hold a complete movie in digital form. It is expected that DVDs will be sold as stand-alone consumer devices, as well as ancillary computer devices to be used like CD-ROM players.
Implementing redundant fiber architectures
January 31, 1997 7:00 pm | by Dr. Eric Schweitzer, Product Manager, Harmonic Lightwaves | CommentsAs system operators offer advanced services such as video-on-demand, Internet access and telephony, the need for providing reliable, "interrupt-free" service escalates. The first step to ensuring that customers receive high-quality, reliable service is to implement redundant network architectures, where a backup system seamlessly fills in during times of primary system outage.
