The video signal is muxed onto the fiber after the OLT, so the only shared portion of the infrastructure is the passive fiber. That’s effectively an uncontended resource. The single mode fiber has vastly more capacity than you can actually use with the active components of the network. Your limit in data speeds is from the OLT, and the Ethernet ports those OLTs are plugged into, none of which is shared with TV.
"The fiber has plenty of capacity" seems like an argument against data caps, considering that getting/keeping the fiber in the ground is the major cost.
The whole concept of separation seems like a dodge. Is there any real advantage to using separate equipment for TV vs. using the same hardware resources to provide more data capacity and using IP multicast? Or is that what they are doing, and just doing it on separate hardware in order to claim separation?
> "The fiber has plenty of capacity" seems like an argument against data caps, considering that getting/keeping the fiber in the ground is the major cost.
No, a huge part of the cost is the active equipment, which also requires maintenance and upgrades. Have you priced aggregation routers with 10G ports recently?
> Is there any real advantage to using separate equipment for TV vs. using the same hardware resources to provide more data capacity and using IP multicast?
Yes, injecting the TV signal as RF over glass is vastly simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than using IP multicast. There is also the fact that it pre-dates streaming services, and is an outgrowth of the analog CATV distribution systems that were in places for decades before streaming Internet TV.
> No, a huge part of the cost is the active equipment, which also requires maintenance and upgrades. Have you priced aggregation routers with 10G ports recently?
At something like $1000/port, for 100 Mbps symmetric broadband customers that's $10/customer divided by the oversubscription ratio, per hardware refresh cycle (say three years). The percentage of the customer's monthly bill rounds to zero.
And the maintenance cost may be significant, but it also shouldn't really be proportional to the traffic level.
> Yes, injecting the TV signal as RF over glass is vastly simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than using IP multicast.
It just seems like the opposite of how everything else is going. Virtualization, SDN, etc. Get everything running on the same kind of hardware so everything is fungible, failed hardware can be swapped out with universal replacements, idle resources can be reallocated to other workloads without changing hardware, etc.
> There is also the fact that it pre-dates streaming services, and is an outgrowth of the analog CATV distribution systems that were in places for decades before streaming Internet TV.
This would be easier to believe from Comcast than Verizon.
> At something like $1000/port, for 100 Mbps symmetric broadband customers that's $10/customer divided by the oversubscription ratio, per hardware refresh cycle (say three years). The percentage of the customer's monthly bill rounds to zero.
If you're only building enough active equipment to support 100 mbps service, then your point about sharing capacity on the fiber itself with RF TV is entirely irrelevant--you've got nowhere near enough active equipment to exceed the capacity of even a single pair of wavelengths.
Compare that to something like Comcast's Gigabit Pro. Each user gets their own port on a 10G aggregation router. The CPE is a Juniper ACX-2100. And you need a beefy router after that to do traffic shaping. (Due to the way the traffic policing works, Comcast will happily deliver 25MB at 10 gbps before the policer kicks in, which completely overwhelms any consumer router you put after the Juniper.) That's thousands of dollars per user in active equipment--and you're still using just a single pair of wavelengths.
> It just seems like the opposite of how everything else is going. Virtualization, SDN, etc. Get everything running on the same kind of hardware so everything is fungible, failed hardware can be swapped out with universal replacements, idle resources can be reallocated to other workloads without changing hardware, etc.
There is nothing cheap, simple, or reliable about SDN. Flexible yes, but not those other things. It takes enormous amounts of hardware to, e.g. build an SDN switch with VPP that can compare to a $1,000 Juniper 10G switch.
RF over Glass is super easy and cheap. You get a feed from a head-end, and you inject it into a passive fiber network. There is no IP, no routing, nothing active in the delivery network until you get to the CPE.
