Blank TV screens as cable firm ditches analogue

On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:20:23 +0000, Terry Casey
wrote:

Can you tell me how YOU would migrate your 100% analogue customer base
to a 100% digital customer base without transmitting both analogue AND
digital signals during the transition period?

Easily - but it needs proper thought and planning, two qualities not
in evidence at any cable companies in the UK.

Easiest way is just to make sure that your first generation of
digital-capable set top boxes are also analogue capable. (It's not
hard, US cablecos manage it.)

Switch all your legacy set top boxes over to the new boxes. All
customers remain watching analogue signals. Once all customers have
the new boxes, light-switch overnight to digital. Easy.

You can contrast this with the innovative approaches taken by UK cable
companies, where in some areas the forthcoming upgrade to digital
meant that all legacy analogue boxes had to be changed over to...
other analogue boxes. Digital roll-out could then begin in earnest
once the legacy analogue base had been converted to a different
analogue base.

Couldn't make it up.
--

On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:50:54 +0000, Terry Casey
wrote:

The only people affected would be former cable customers who are
stealing an analogue service for free, if the drop cable hasn't been
disconnected, rather that pay to have an efficient aerial installed.

Or people who were quite legitimately receiving unscrambled signals
intended for general public reception.

Justice would only be served if the cableco investigated all these
complainants and pursued them through the courts for theft of service!

Theft of free analogue signal? Bizarre...

--

Zero Tolerance wrote:
On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:55:52 +0000, Terry Casey
wrote:

A cable customer will receive either an analogue or a digital service -
never both!

Many digital cable customers will still make use of the analogue
off-air channels which still come down the same cable.


Many? Obviously, as Virgin Media (who I assume you're referring too)
comes from such a convoluted background of many much smaller companies
who originally had different strategies, it is impossible to cover all
eventualities.

There are some parts of the network which were once specifically set up
to provide services to estates which otherwise had a 'no aerials, no
dishes' policy - although these would be a very small part of the
overall network today - where there *might* be a policy of continuing to
supply an analogue off-air facility to digital customers but I doubt it
happening elsewhere.

If you are suggesting that customers take advantage of analogue signals
on the network and find their own way of accessing them, that is a
different matter entirely as the entire network is VM property and it is
a standard condition of supply that only VM equipment can be connected
to it.

Terry

In message , Zero Tolerance
writes
On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:20:23 +0000, Terry Casey
wrote:

Can you tell me how YOU would migrate your 100% analogue customer base
to a 100% digital customer base without transmitting both analogue AND
digital signals during the transition period?

Easily - but it needs proper thought and planning, two qualities not
in evidence at any cable companies in the UK.

Easiest way is just to make sure that your first generation of
digital-capable set top boxes are also analogue capable. (It's not
hard, US cablecos manage it.)

Switch all your legacy set top boxes over to the new boxes. All
customers remain watching analogue signals. Once all customers have
the new boxes, light-switch overnight to digital. Easy.

You can contrast this with the innovative approaches taken by UK cable
companies, where in some areas the forthcoming upgrade to digital
meant that all legacy analogue boxes had to be changed over to...
other analogue boxes. Digital roll-out could then begin in earnest
once the legacy analogue base had been converted to a different
analogue base.

Couldn't make it up.

I think you just did - well, at least some of it. I'm certainly not
aware of any cases when "all legacy analogue boxes had to be changed
over to other analogue boxes". All I can think of is that you might be
referring to cases where some very old analogue 'non-frequency-agile'
boxes were changed for more modern types (or something similar) - but I
don't think that this would have been part of the migration to digital.

Have you any idea of the additional cost of producing an interim dual
analogue+digital STB? This would have been considerably more expensive
than either than original analogue-only STB or the 'final' digital-only
STB! And especially when this type of STB wasn't really needed?
Undoubtedly, the USA had good reason for doing what they did (I can
certainly think of one of them) - and the UK would have had its good
reasons too.

Anyway, what happened in the UK was that digital channels were initially
introduced where there was any 'spare' spectrum. This provided a basic
digital service carrying most of the existing analogue channels.

Then the less-viable analogue channels started to be progressively
removed, and more digital channels (transport streams, containing 6 to 8
TV channels, plus some radio - just like DTT does) were progressively
introduced in the space vacated (often with a certain amount of
frequency-juggling).

Eventually, the only analogues left were the 'essential' five basic
analogue off-airs (unscrambled, of course) - plus maybe a few more
(usually some of what was available on Freeview), also carried as
analogue (and usually unscrambled). At certain stages during the
progressive change-over, the cable company might have been able to give
the customer the option of changing to digital (but note that there's
more involved than simply providing the RF signal), or hanging onto the
analogue. However, once he had gone to digital, the analogue STB was
usually removed.
--
Ian

hwh wrote:
Terry Casey wrote:
There is a major difference here between the Dutch and Belgian cable
networks and the situation in the UK.

On the continent, set top boxes were used in the early days due to the
use of out-of-band signals

Not in the Netherlands. I have never seen one, for analogue that is.
Except when...



I only ever saw one, and that was in Belgium. It was connected to quite
an old TV and had a large 'turret tuner' type of knob on the front
marked A B C D etc., rather than numbers.

History may play a part here - I remember being told that cable started
off in Belgium in the Ardennes, where the terrain made off-air reception
very difficult, then spread across the country until it finally reached
the coast - which is where I saw the elderly TV and STB. I don't know
how long this process took but if TV manufacturers reacted quickly to
the challenge of equipping their new receivers with coverage of the S
channels, then most sets in use by this time wouldn't have needed a STB.

This, from memory, was the channel line-up from one Belgian cablenet
in the mid 70s:

BRT1, BRT2, RTBF1, RTBF2, NOS1, NOS2, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, TF1, A2, FR3,
RTLi, ARD, ZDF, Mosaic channel. RAI uno was added after a couple of
years.

There was also one scrambled subscription channel - Filmnet - with the
decoder being connected to the SCART socket on the TV.

....you subscibed to Filmnet. Home-made descramblers were quite popular
until Filmnet started using a new system that used Nicam for its sound,
which was not normally available over here (we use the German dual FM
carrier system).
Channel line up should be right. In the Netherlands they used street
cabinets with converters. In the transport network, no UHF channels were
used but in every street cabinet all channels transported on special
frequencies were converted to standard UHF channels.
A typical layout was like this:
Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 24, 28, 31, 35, 38, 42, 45, 49, 52.

Later on, better amplifiers and converters, combined with tv tuners
designed for cable use allowed many more channels, without the
converters per channel.


So, although the Netherlands adopted a different approach in the early
stages, ultimately you ended up with the same situation as in Belgium,
with broadband VHF cable connected direct to the subscriber's TV.

For the benefit of anybody puzzled by the reference to S channels, this
refers to the 'Special' channels which covered the gaps between BI and
BII (I think these were only used in Belgium), between BII and BIII,
then from the top of BIII to 300MHz. This gave continuous coverage from
47 - 300MHz which was very much leading edge for a CATV network when
first introduced

Later, the hyperband filled the gap between 300MHz and BIV.

Terry

charles wrote:
In article ,
Mark Carver wrote:

J G Miller wrote:

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:25:24 +0000, Charles asked:


how do you think cable services get their signals?

Some cable companies get their signal for some radio and TV stations
direct from the radio or TV station rather than from an off air signal.


I'm not aware of any that do that.


in the '60s the BBC used to feed British Relay direct from LO SWC.


Yes certainly up to late 60s cos I was sent from SWC to BR office in
Fulham Road (near Chelsea and Westminster Hospital) to see if they could
either get a microwave from anywhere sensible or see CP!

Mike

Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Paul
Martin writes

In article ,
Terry Casey wrote:

A cable customer will receive either an analogue or a digital service -
never both!


Oh aye? So the analogue signals I'm getting off my "digital cable" are
a figment of my imagination? BBC1, BBC2, ITV1 Granada, C4,
Five[anamorphic], and BBC News Channel all sit between E22 and E30.

But do you still have an analogue STB? If not, I presume that you are
receiving them directly on the TV or VCR, and the rest of the service is
digital (for which you will need a cable STB). It's unusual for a
customer to have both and analogue and a digital STB.

I suspect that what Paul means is that (like some of my relatives) he
still has the cable feed into him that was installed while he had a
cable service and it is complete with the analogue channels which I have
fed on to his VCR and the in-house distribution for other TVs around the
house that don't want Sky

Mike

Zero Tolerance wrote:
On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:20:23 +0000, Terry Casey
wrote:

Can you tell me how YOU would migrate your 100% analogue customer base
to a 100% digital customer base without transmitting both analogue AND
digital signals during the transition period?

Easily - but it needs proper thought and planning, two qualities not
in evidence at any cable companies in the UK.

Easiest way is just to make sure that your first generation of
digital-capable set top boxes are also analogue capable. (It's not
hard, US cablecos manage it.)

I bow to your obviously superior knowledge - I've never seen or heard of
one this side of the pond.


Switch all your legacy set top boxes over to the new boxes. All
customers remain watching analogue signals. Once all customers have
the new boxes, light-switch overnight to digital. Easy.

You can contrast this with the innovative approaches taken by UK cable
companies, where in some areas the forthcoming upgrade to digital
meant that all legacy analogue boxes had to be changed over to...
other analogue boxes. Digital roll-out could then begin in earnest
once the legacy analogue base had been converted to a different
analogue base.

Couldn't make it up.

Was this to get rid of Switched Star technology, by any chance?

When the 'cable Britain' thing kicked off, HMG decided that Switched
Star was the way of the future. I think they insisted on it for the
early franchises and certainly weighted Switched Star against Broadband
by granting, IIRC, 23 year licences for Switched Star but only 17 years
for Broadband.

Switched Star was extremely expensive to implement and, partly because
it was largely untried, not particularly reliable. Remember that there
was a hell of a lot of intelligence in street cabinets, subject to a lot
of environmental stresses apart from anything else.

I don't think Switched Star attracted much attention outside the UK and
there wasn't much equipment around, so cable operators abandoned it -
despite HMG's inducements - at the earliest practical moment.

When the time came to upgrade the networks for DTV, I doubt there was
anybody left to supply the equipment required.

I note that one supplier - Cabletime (the only other one I recall was
GEC) - still exists but Switched Star systems don't feature on their
website today (which claimed their kit covered only 500,000 homes).

To uprade one of these networks would have been a mammoth task compared
with the existing broadband networks (I know of one which has simply
been shut down!)

I would guess that most of the existing street cabinets would have been
required for new distribution equipment, displacing the ageing Switched
Star stuff and, effectively making it homeless!

As for the STBs, these were the simplest thing imaginable - basically a
simple VHF/UHF converter and a primitive transponder to relay channel
selection commands back to the intelligent equipment in the street.

Terry

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:25:24 +0000, charles wrote:
In article , Duncan Corps
wrote:
On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:28:04 +0000, chunkyoldcortina wrote:
But residents aren't happy cos the publicity has been that Digital
Switchover happens in that area in 2011 (the Sandy Heath switchover)
so "how dare Virgin switch it off earlier than the official date"
(paraphrased).

What does the "Digital Switchover" have to do with cable TV anyway? My
understanding was that it was solely about the terrestrial broadcasts
(i.e. what people receive through an aerial).

how do you think cable services get their signals?

Does that really matter?

It is demonstrably true that digital signals can be converted into
analogue ones, and vice versa. It's how Freeview set top boxes and CD
players work...

On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:35:26 +0100, J G Miller wrote:
On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:20:35 +0100, hwh wrote:
Ah, I see what you mean. The headed source should be analogue over
DVB-T, for as long as possible.

If that is the case, then the cable viewers will not get a widescreen
picture but only the 4:3/14:9 picture transmitted on analog.

It's demonstrably possible to transmit a 16:9 (letterboxed or anamorphic)
picture over an analogue system. Some PAL VHS videos did this.