response 8 of 290:

Jan 19 17:52 UTC 2006

Re #6: Running fiber to each room is purely a future play.  Fiber is
expensive and hard to deal with, and its not clear that there will ever
be a need for fiber to each room.  Personally I wouldn't bother; I'd just
pull enough cables (at least two coax and two data; more for main places
like a home office or the main TV room) for future needs.

A friend recently learned a painful lesson about this.  When his home
was built, they ran a coax line up to the roof for convenient mounting
of a rooftop antenna for OTA or DBS; he used it for a DBS dish.  Now, he
wants to upgrade to add a second dish to get more channels and HD
content and such.  Unfortunately, the second dish would need a second
coax line, and only a single one was run during construction; the line
goes behind cinder blocks or something and there's no practical way to
get back in and add another.

Now, he would need to buy some sort of magic switching box which would
let the two signals share a single cable; it would cost something like
$400, and it would become obsolete within a year when they change to MPEG4
and he would have to buy another one.  So that's a cost of $800 to try to
fix the problem of not having a second cable (and even then the problem
wouldn't be completely fixed, since he wouldn't be able to watch content
from both dishes at the same time.)  If the builder had simply put in
two coax cables instead of one, the extra cost would have been more like
$2.  My friend decided to give up, lose the dish and get cable instead.


Its not clear how long analog cable will continue to exist.  Cable
companies would love to get rid of it and move to digital everything,
because digital transmission makes more efficient use of the spectrum
and so they could fit a lot more channels, or other services, on the
line.  However, it would also piss off most existing customers when
their "cable ready" TVs stop working, so I'm not sure how they dig
themselves out of that one.  But at least for cable companies its purely
a business decision, while for OTA it's politics.

Re #7: As an analog subscriber, if you have a QAM-256 tuner, you should
be able to watch all the digital content which is unencrypted.  This
includes digital versions of many analog channels, and HD versions of
most locals, and any VOD content your neighbors happen to be streaming.
You would not be able to initiate interactive services like VOD or PPV,
and you wouldn't be able to watch encrypted channels like HBO.  There
would be no guide, and the channel numbers would seem weird and annoying
and would change from time to time for no apparent reason because you're
not watching in the intended fashion.

The cable company will install jacks for you, but theyll do it by
stapling the wire to the outside of your home and drilling in at various
locations.  Some people find this disagreeable, but it is the most
convenient option.