Wireless broadband

Fazer6

Does anyone use Fastnet or Net1 wireless broadband?

If so, I'd be interested to hear your opinions, good or bad, about either.

Fazer6.

watty

Try the Broadband forum!

The tax man

watty wrote:

Try the Broadband forum!

Watty,(or any ICDG mods) just wondering why we still have Broadband in the title here. Very few BB threads are started here and most of those seem to be redirected to the BB forum or not replied to at all.

byte

Hmm, it may be worth considering removing Broadband from the forum title.

Anyway, posts get moved/pointed to the Broadband forum, as you'll generally get a much quicker response and answer to the query, than you would in here.

watty

Long ago there were a few tiny areas that had Chorus Powernet and NTL Digital cable broadband when ADSL was just a dream in Ireland.

So that is probabily why. A few Chorus & NTL had broadband before anyone else.

If the companies had only had more vision and money then!

byte

Yup, I think watty has pretty much nailed it.

The tax man

Totally agree with the connections between cable companies and BB but just look at the amount of NTL BB threads in the BB forum compared to here.
Just thought it might make things a bit easier for newer members.:)

irlrobins

I agree. Broadband forum has superseded the broadband aspect of this forum.

watty

I think some kind of specially holy high up species of Moderator is needed to actually rename a Forum, Like Cloud or Vexorg or Regi

irlrobins

yea but if you request it they will more than likely do it.

byte

But we need the go-ahead from Mr ICDG.

What about Cable / MMDS / IPTV instead maybe?

icdg

That was kinda the whole idea in putting "Broadband" in the title - before these type of TV services came about, I kinda wanted to include kind of TV over broadband services that Eircom and BT were mooting at the time, but they themselves haven't really launched.

The likes of Magnet aren't CATV as we know it, but I'd like to include them in this forum.

Any other comments? I'm willing to go with Cable / MMDS / IPTV if that's what people want, or is there a better name?

watty

Most IPTV is really a cable clone. So IPTV fine. If anyone stumbles on a REAL VOD (Video on Demand) service, let me know. I'm trying to design one and it isnt easy.

The tax man

I'm liking the new hip and trendy style we have around here now.:D

bk

watty wrote:

Most IPTV is really a cable clone. So IPTV fine. If anyone stumbles on a REAL VOD (Video on Demand) service, let me know. I'm trying to design one and it isnt easy.

Well I got the chance to use Comcast VOD system in Boston. It was excellent, very easy to use. It was amazing watching three episodes of Rome ina row on HBO VOD.

They also got the pricing right, the VOD service was included free in the price of the HBO subscription.

Another great thing was being able to watch/listen/sing along to various music concerts on the VOD system in a full house drinking home made Margaritas after coming in from the pub

BTW The pricing was important I fear too many cableco's and content companies believe people will pay very every old show they watch. HBO got it very right making it a free extra value to their existing subscription service.

watty

I wonder how many users it has and how they deliver their network.

It doubtfull if much Dublin cable can support much and on copper pairs, ADSL2 / VDSL with lots of backhaul is needed. 8Mbps needed on each user end connection and average of maybe (users * 3) Mps backhaul in addition to normal backhaul for Internet.

Scary numbers given Ireland's backhauld costs and local loop quality.

watty

bk wrote:

<snipped>
Another great thing was being able to watch/listen/sing along to various music concerts on the VOD system in a full house drinking home made Margaritas after coming in from the pub

Hmm, anything might seem good then. How long at Pub and how many Margaritas?

bk

watty wrote:

Hmm, anything might seem good then. How long at Pub and how many Margaritas?

Yes, but in fairness I had been watching Rome the day before while completely sober.

I don't know any technical details about the system behind it. The picture quality looked very good, so I assume it was a relatively high bit rate.

I assume they have a low number of homes per sector and it is also worth pointing out that they have gotten rid of the analogue service, alll digital, so lots of space saved there.

Interesting article about consumer demand for VOD here:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/10/04/technology/techinvestor/hellweg/

Gandhi

Watty,

Are you trying to build a VOD system just for your house to stream over your network, or are you trying to build a full, commercial-grade system to stream over actual cable plant to multiple households?

Typically a single head-end would service 30,000 subscribers and be capable of delivering 10,000 VOD streams simultaneously. These would not all be on the same cable plant.

For bandwidth, the minimum would be 3.75 Mbps for standard def and 10 Mbps for high def. Those are minimum - if you are watching anything with any reasonable amount of movement at those rates, you will see a lot of tiling.

A typical VOD implementation consists of the following:

1. Client software running on the subscribers' Set Top Boxes.
2. Session management / Resource management servers at head-end to interact with set-top client, and allocate / control resources necessary to stream the content.
3. Streaming Server / VOD pump (Arroyo, Broadbus, Concurrent, Sea-Change, C-COR would be vendors of these) to stream MPEG packets to Edge Device.
4. Edge Device (Harmonic, Scientific Atlanta, Motorola, Arris would be the leading vendors) to modulate streamed MPEG packets to QAM-256 on coax.
5. Out-of-band Modulator (OM - Motorola and SA make them) to modulate session control / stream control traffic from the Session management servers to the target set-top box.
6. Return-path demodulator (RPD - Motorola and SA again) to retrieve session control / stream control messages coming upstream on the coax from the set-top box, and pass them onto the session management servers.
7. Top-of-the line fibre-optic switch to handle MPEG traffic between streaming servers and edge devices.

I have left out some of the stuff that you would have at a digital head-end anyway, and skipped the entitlement / business management stuff, as well as the content-ingest mechanism (getting the movies on the streaming servers in the first place).

VOD installations are surpisingly complicated, as the cable companies want to maximize use of cable bandwidth and storage space, squeezing every last drop out of both.