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Phonelines: Not Just For POTS And High-Speed Internet? 49

Posted by timothy from the also-for-cable-rides dept.
EEGeek writes "With the advent of DSL a couple years back (1996 I believe), the capacity of simple twisted pair has gone from just POTS/Analog modems to high-speed internet, and now beyond. Recently the local phone company here released a new service, where you get television over the phoneline. They give you a set-top box, and a dsl modem, and you can surf the web, and watch tv on your television. you can also connect a computer or two for high speed internet. My question is, has anyone heard of any phone companies that have done this already? Have you heard of other interesting technologies over twisted pair, for example VoIP? This new service works really well, I'm extremely impressed with it." I remember being pitched movies-by-phoneline when I ordered DSL a few years ago, but have heard nothing since. Anyone with good or bad things to say about such service?
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Phonelines: Not Just For POTS And High-Speed Internet? More

Phonelines: Not Just For POTS And High-Speed Internet?

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  • Done already... (Score:4, Informative)

    by nsrbrake ( 233425 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @06:13PM (#4629095) Homepage
    Years ago:
    http://www.nbtel.nb.ca/
    Yes, in New Brunswick, Canada.
    I believe this was already discussed on /.

    • NBTel is known to many telecom engineers in Canada to have (or at least in the early/mid 90s) one of the most advanced phone systems in Canada.

      Dave
    • www.imagictv.com

      I used to work there. Rough times for telco suppliers these days, the technology does work OK though. It has some glitches, but basically, there aren't that many people interested in big capital investments into telecom gear these days.

  • I'd think that cable companies would love something like this, where they could stream you televison instead of constantly broadcasting it. It would probably save them gazillions of dollars to only send people the programs they want to watch because they would have to spend so much less on getting enough bandwidth. Not only that, but you could decide whether you want to stick commercials into the stream (as they do now) or for you to pay a higher rate. You could pay by the shows you watch, too. But of course, they wouldn't be able to rip people off constantly.
    • I'd think that cable companies would love something like this, where they could stream you televison instead of constantly broadcasting it. It would probably save them gazillions of dollars to only send people the programs they want to watch because they would have to spend so much less on getting enough bandwidth

      Currently the cable companies have the simplest technological solution possible. They just dump a whole wad of RF signal out to all of their customers-- no routing, no really complex hardware sitting out in the field waiting to break down. Almost all of the interesting equipment is in the head-end; once they've put together they're broadcast and sent it out, all of the distribution equipment is relatively dumb; stuff like amps and frequency converters.

      It works fine for now, and they're loath to change it. Imagine how much less reliable the cable system would be if there were thousands of unmanned routers/switches scattered throughout your city?

      The next upgrade for cable is to start broadcasting video-on-demand over the existing system. Essentially it'll work like your cable modem; you'll be sharing a local loop with a bunch of people, but you'll get one or two customized on-demand channels. This won't save them a dime in bandwidth-- in fact, it'll probably cost them a lot to upgrade their networks to the point where there is enough bandwidth to run this kind of solution (too many houses currently on the local loops.) But they'll do it because people want those services and DSL tech could easily get there first.

      • The next upgrade for cable is to start broadcasting video-on-demand over the existing system. Essentially it'll work like your cable modem; you'll be sharing a local loop with a bunch of people, but you'll get one or two customized on-demand channels. This won't save them a dime in bandwidth-- in fact, it'll probably cost them a lot to upgrade their networks to the point where there is enough bandwidth to run this kind of solution (too many houses currently on the local loops.) But they'll do it because people want those services and DSL tech could easily get there first.

        Ummm, Time Warner is already doing this in Wisconsin. Channnel 1000 is MOD(movies on demand) and above that is HBO, Cinemax and TMC on demand. And I know that this is not the first area to have the service avalible...But don't worry their not about to run out of bandwidth, I don't have the specs next to me but they still have at least 1/4 of the avalible bandwidth unused.

        Also you won't get one or two customized channels, What the hell would 1 or 2 be for??? You can only watch one thing at once. What happens is when you order any ondemand service you get allocated a "channel"(not really a channel cuz the number doesn't change but its the bandwidth of one channel) And when you stop watching the VOD for a few minutes the "channel" is released for someone else to use. Also like I said before they have allocated more than enough bandwidth for VOD and still have much unallocated.
        • Also you won't get one or two customized channels, What the hell would 1 or 2 be for??? You can only watch one thing at once.

          Many households have more than one TV.

          But don't worry their not about to run out of bandwidth, I don't have the specs next to me but they still have at least 1/4 of the avalible bandwidth unused

          That's because they still have miniscule adoption rates. When this service becomes popular, it'll be trickier, because cable companies aren't thrilled about devoting precious bandwidth to on-demand services rather than new channels.

          But it'll get really interesting when they go from offering movies-on-demand to the next step, which is offering TV-on-demand. By this, I mean being able to watch any TV show you want off of a server in your cable company's head-end (like a Tivo, but without the requirement that you specify which shows to record.) You'll be able to pause/ff/rewind streams, and if you suddenly get the urge to watch last Wednesday's "Law and Order", it'll be streamed to your cable box).

          At that point, even using multicast for some channels, it'll require a big chunk of the spectrum to satisfy the needs of a large neighborhood.

  • not with twisted pair but with coax (Score:4, Informative)

    by cybergeak ( 318482 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @06:44PM (#4629276)
    a local, power-company funded broadband company rolled out fiber across the town, and offers phone, internet and tv in one package. the actual wiring of the house is no different as there is a box in the neighborhood that takes the fiber signal in turns it into coax, and from there another box is attached to the house that splits it again to phone, and tv/internet. internet over a cable modem.

    3 in 1 service is nice, and cheeper than getting phone through qwest or some other company and tv/internet from charter or someone.

    astound.net if anyone is interested
    • This is basically what most cable companies do now, its called Hybrid Fiber Coax. Long runs with fiber and neighborhood runs with coax. They are just also offering phone service, which with IP phones is really not a big deal. That and they are doing an inital rollout, unlike cable companies just adding cable modems to there services.

  • AT&T (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @06:55PM (#4629335) Homepage
    AT&T was planning on doing this in a big way, building huge amounts of infrastructure for the task. POTS really doesn't have the bandwidth to carry the same number of channels as coax; instead, the line would only be used to carry a few channels, which would be switched at the central office. It would have been a massive video-on-demand service with TiVo-like capabilities.

    If I remember correctly, AT&T dropped their plans or put them on ice when the FCC decided cable companies had to allow other ISPs to sell their service over the cable lines. A similar ruling against the new POTS-carrier service would have made the investment unprofitable, and AT&T was waiting to see what would happen.
    • A number of companies have tried their hand at this and found it challenging. One major obstacle is the inconsistent quality of telephone lines - at least, the last bit of copper from the hut to the house. In crowded metro areas, you may get wire plants that have outlived the people who installed them. In the 'burbs, you have lots of very loooooong runs of copper (mine's something like 2900 feet to the fiber hut).

      The cable companies have an advantage in a higher-bandwidth medium, but the telcos have a larger installed base and higher reliability.

      Twisted-pair copper is the "lowest common denominator" - it's slow, lossy, and doesn't work well with shared services, but it'll get a dial tone and maybe 20-40kb of data even to the middle of nowhere.

      AT&T did introduce an interesting fixed wireless product a couple of years ago - phone service plus 512kb dsl-like data service, via a small house-mounted antenna with a service unit inside the home. I tried it out and was really impressed with the technology. Unfortunately, AT&T had such massive problems with the billing (we got charged anywhere from 49 cents/min to $3.60/min for domestic long distance!), and the number portability was botched so badly, that we had to drop it.
    • In my area AT&T reran all of our cable in our neighborhood back when they bought out TCI Cable. After that they began offering Digital Cable, Local phone Service, and Broadband internet. Nothing like the video on demand. I know USWest was going to offer TV stuff over VDSL in like Arizona or something but I don't know what happened with that.

  • service offered (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lepruhkawn ( 199083 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @06:57PM (#4629347) Homepage
    I had DSL a couple years ago and they offered a video on demand service partnered with blockbuster.

    I interrogated the DSL installer dude and he said that the picture looked worse the better the TV you had. He noted that people with better equipment tended to be disappointed.

    I'm not suprised. My digital cable stations have annoying visual artifacts and isn't the data rate coming off a DVD in the 1 to 10 Mb/s range? It seems like you'd need mighty DSL to compare to a DVD so I am less inclined to bother with such technologies.
    • This could easily be a bad resize function. If they're using a standard resolution and an MPEG stream then the MPEG artifacting will get worse when the video is properly scaled for display on your television.

  • VoIP!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @06:57PM (#4629351)
    Why would phone companies want to run VoIP over and IP network running over a perfectly good phone network? They already have a perfectly good circuit switched network in place running right up to your house over the same twisted pair copper wire that you are getting your DSL service over.

    What would they stand to gain from putting out the money to switch that voice service to be run over an IP being run on the same copper wire, other than adding congestion to their IP networks?

    What advantage would adding VoIP to their networks offer to the user, other than increased latency and dropped packets to destroy the sound quality of their phone calls?
    • Well, I worked at the local telco, and from what I understand is, (and my knowledge of electrical engineering, telco networks, and IP), it is feasible on the existing network across my province, with much bandwidth to spare, and cheaper than using existing long distance trunks.
    • What would they stand to gain from putting out the money to switch that voice service to be run over an IP being run on the same copper wire, other than adding congestion to their IP networks?

      Currently telcos have to run two disparate packet-switching networks, sometimes on the same hardware. I have no idea what the backbones used to carry voice traffic look like today, and frankly not much more idea what the IP stuff looks like, but the point is that they're both packet switching networks. Why not just have one?

      You don't want to add VoIP to the network necessarily, you want to replace the network with something that just does IP, and then provide phone service over VoIP which has a number of advantages I need not outline here.

  • The telco I work for is deploying this right now. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pointer80 ( 38430 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @07:07PM (#4629403)
    <shameless plug>

    The telco that I work for, Ringgold Telephone Company [rtctel.com], is deploying video services over coppyer, including video on demand (VOD) right now.

    </shameless plug>

    I think the nicest feature of these services is VOD. With VOD you'll never have to go to the video store again. I don't know about everyone else, but this will save me a lot of money in late fees. And with VOD you don't loose any of the features of a DVD/VHS tape, you can still pause, fast forward, rewind, etc.

    /pointer
  • back in the early 90s, they had a series of ads (Ever shop for a 3 piece suit in your underwear? You will! And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T). Of course, back then, most of their ideas seemed mundane or overly fanciful (like 1920s "city of the future" deals where everyone flys instead of drives), but it was obvious AT&T wouldn't be the ones bringint it to us.
  • From a different angle, soon you'll just have to plug your power supply into a socket and you'll have your internet too.
    • I seem to remember reading in Wired a few years ago that it was fundamentally impossible to network through the power lines. Something to do with the loss of coherent data through the voltage transformers.
      • through the power lines yes, but not through your house, radio shack has a thing that you plug between a fone line and an outlet then you plug the other piece into any outlet in your house to use as a fone line, you could have the data incoming through coax or whatever, but then network within your house through the electrical wiring

        • I think that would be ok for voice transmission, but I'm not sure I would trust it for networking. What happens when your A/C kicks on? Or someone turns on the can opener? I think you would have to put a noise filter on all of your household appliances!

          Demonstration: coil your CAT5 around a hair dryer a couple of times and turn it on. See what your packet loss is then!

  • Homechoice (Score:2)

    by Yarn ( 75 )
    http://www.homechoice.co.uk/ [homechoice.co.uk] Been going a couple of years, but not seen any adverts for it recently. Website still seems active however.

  • Qwest (Score:2, Informative)

    by nelsonal ( 549144 )
    Qwest was running tests on services like these, in Phoenix and Denver I believe. Also, there was a start up that tried to sell DSL based VOIP phone lines to small businesses for about $5 a line, they would split a single DSL connection into several phone lines. I don't remember its name, and haven't heard much from them since.
  • Great, if the content is provided by someone OTHER then AT&T. I mean, we have this technology that will offer the cable/satelite providers another competitor (something that everyone has been begging for) and it would be such a shame to just give it over to AT&T. If it's done by the local providers (Qwest, bleh) then at least we have more options.

  • Put a pair in your mouth, then call the number. (Score:3, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @08:23PM (#4629830) Journal
    They give an excellent electric shock.

  • It's happening now (Score:3, Informative)

    by zobo ( 60591 ) on Friday November 08, 2002 @09:23PM (#4630099)
    (Disclaimer: I work for a company that builds part of the platform for these services)

    It's happening today! Qwest [qwest.com] has over 60k video subscribers in Phoenix and Denver. Qwest is supporting 3 video streams over a single settop box via VDSL. Up in Canada (Manitoba), MTS [yahoo.com] will be commercially rolling out video over VDSL in Winnipeg starting early next year. Our platform also supports video over ADSL, with the tradeoff that only 2 streams are supported rather than VDSL's 3 streams, though the reach is 11kft or more as opposed to VDSL's ~4kft from the remote terminal. Many of the independents have expressed interest in the ADSL platform, with SCRTC [scrtc.com] [this link doesn't work in Mozilla :(] having a few thousand subs online as of today I believe.

    Basically the telcos are extremely motivated to find new revenue streams because their lunch (POTS) is being eaten by wireless providers and cable companies offering telephony. Unfortunately this desire is modulated by Wall St. taking an extremely dim view of CapEx spending with the economy in its present state.

    • SaskTel [sasktel.com] has the service available in Saskatoon and Regina right now, here in Saskatchewan Canada... MTS is doing pretty much exactly the same thing SaskTel, but they're a year to two years behind SaskTel, because they started later...
  • With the advent of DSL a couple years back (1996 I believe)...

    Since when does a "couple" mean six?

    • Re:Fuzzy Math (Score:1, Insightful)

      by EEGeek ( 183888 )
      If I had a degree in english, perhaps I would speak with perfect english 100% of the time, but since I'm an engineer, and hence can't speak perfect english, but rather speak geek quite fluently, I believe I'm doing a decent job in getting the idea across. You knew exactly what I meant, hence who is worse, me or you for bringing up a completely moot point? I can atleast bring up comments which are very relevent to the thread...
  • in NW minnesota, Halstad Telephone [halstadtel.com] has been offering this for at least a couple of years now...
  • A telco in the UK called Kingston Communications has had this sort of service deployed for a few years now. The service is called "Kingston Interactive Television", KIT [kitv.co.uk].

    This service offers standard (digital) broadcast TV channels, interactive TV services such as shopping and email, video on demand etc. The STB also has an Ethernet port for connecting a home LAN and uses VoDSL to provide POTS voice.
  • I've mentioned it before but the local rural phone coops in my area (and that I work for in a round-about way) are doing this. This [brandenburgtelecom.com] is the CLEC we are running in Elizabethtown, KY against Verizon/Alltel and Comcast. My phone company [scrtc.com] is the ILEC in Barren County and their service is very similar.

    The only downside to our combined services (Voice/Data/TV) is to get the TV/DSL, you have to be within our ADSL range ~20000'. Inside the towns where the CO's exist is not a problem, but we have to drop a remote DSLAM/Video head every 6 miles to cover, which is both expensive and makes for a slow rollout.
    • I would have to agree, in the cities its much easiear, because CO's are fairly close... while DSL has a limit of approx. 4km here (for 1.5mbps), 3km (for 2mbps), and 2.5km (for 3mbps), the television subscriber has to be less than 2km from the box... so the telecom is placing DSLAM units around the city every so far apart (not quite sure how far). This is making the average range for a person in the city ~0.5-1km. This is making it easier, but for the rural areas, its just not going to happen... atleast in the forseeable future.

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