Sidestepping A-to-D Convertors For Town Government's Cable TV? 539
jake-itguy writes "I am the IT guy for a small town municipality. Comcast called me the other day and told me I had to have a digital-to-analog converter for each TV in the municipality, as Comcast is turning off analog cable in September. I did a quick count, and we have 32 TVs across 6 buildings (22 being in the police and fire departments). Most of the TVs are hung on the walls. I told Comcast having a box for each TV was not acceptable and wanted a different solution. Comcast told me there was no other solution." Read on for more details of the situation, and to see if you can offer Jake any advice for distributing cable service within his Indiana town.
jake-itguy continues: "They told me they have been putting these boxes on every TV in each classroom in each school. I laughed when I heard that. I said, 'Do you know how much electricity is going to be needed for each box?' They didn't know the answer. I was bumped up to the next guy in the Comcast hierarchy, who said there was no other solution and I had to pay $3 per month for each box. Being a municipality, we are entitled to free expanded basic cable as a part of the franchise agreement back in 1982.I know there is a solution, as hospitals and hotels don't have little boxes next their TVs. Unfortunately I haven't found a specific answer to this problem so I am asking Slashdot. Is there a box that can be put in the basement of the town hall that will convert the Comcast signal into a regular digital signal? Most of the TVs in the town have digital tuners per last years a2d conversion of the airwaves. I would be willing to replace the few analog sets with new ones if there is a good solution for this. Each building's cable feed is fed from the town hall. We have a nice big 1-inch cable coming into the building with some splitters coming off the line. Each building gets a 1/2 inch cable. Is there a box that will convert the Comcast signal to analog for the schools? I am sure the schools don't have TVs with digital tuners."
Hotels (Score:5, Informative)
Hotels frequently have a bank of converters, each tuned to a different digital channel. The outputs of all of the converter boxes are put onto separate analog channels, multiplexed and fed through a distribution amplifier.
You would need a box for each channel you wish to receive. While this may work with a hotel where they own all of the premise wiring to the rooms it would be impractical for a widespread system across a city.
Re-distribute necessary channels yourself? (Score:2, Informative)
Pretend you're a small cable company. (Score:3, Informative)
Get a converter for every digital channel you care about and retransmit on analog channels. Don't interfere with other channels. You can do this per-building or for the whole town if it's small enough.
Actually, don't, since that would cost too much for the little benefit you would gain.
Put just a few converters in each building and have a remote switch to pick your digital channel and analog channel.
This is the box you're looking for (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.vecima.com/products.php?line=1026&item=1083
It does the digital to analog conversion in one spot, and is used to handle doing so for large buildings such as hospitals or apartment blocks.
Re:Haft inch (Score:5, Informative)
If you use haft-inch and one inch do describe coax cables maybe your not the best guy for the job.
Half inch, 1 inch, and "625" (which stands for 0.625", or 5/8 inch) are all industry-standard ways to specify the different sizes of 75 Ohm CATV coax Mr. anonymous dumbass. Yes, I am a CATV engineer.
Re:franchise agreement (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like Comcast is trying to make the tradition "boxless cable option" disappear.
I say: the city should push back on this. If nothing else, there should be a boxless cable
option for any TV that can tune into digital signals with a built in tuner. A special cable
box should simply not be required.
There should be some cable package that can be used without a box.
Basic cable from Comcast should be tunable with an HDHR or a naked HDTV.
A-to-D Converter won't work (Score:1, Informative)
Let me get this straight, you have 32 Analog TVs and a Comcast is going digital. So you need D-to-A converters, i.e. Digital (Comcast) to analog (TVs) converters. Am I missing something?
Re:advice: (Score:5, Informative)
Better advice: sue. The FCC is requiring cable providers to maintain analog cable until 2012 [arstechnica.com] unless they provide converters for their customers. Unless I'm misunderstanding, charging their customers to rent the boxes was NOT one of their options.
Re:Cut the cable (Score:4, Informative)
If you bothered to read the complete submission, you would have noticed it's free to their municipality due to an existing agreement.
"Being a municipality, we are entitled to free expanded basic cable as a part of the franchise agreement back in 1982."
At this point, he's trying to stop from using taxpayer money to pay for and run the cable boxes. Hence the point of the submission.
Re:Cut the cable (Score:2, Informative)
Being a municipality, we are entitled to free expanded basic cable as a part of the franchise agreement back in 1982.
They are not 'paying' for the cable TV.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Analog broadcast to digital you mean, HD doesn't enter into it. If a station wanted to broadcast multiple SD channels instead of HD, they would have the FCC's blessing.
Sorry to nitpick, but too many people think the digital transition was all about HD, when it was in reality nothing to do with HD.
Call the lawyers for a chat... (Score:5, Informative)
If the franchise agreement really says you get expanded basic in exchange for them getting the franchise, then I'd have a word with the township's lawyers. Depending on how the deal is stated, it's probably Comcast's problem to make this work, not yours. I suspect that if the town's lawyers had a word with Comcast's lawyers, then someone in Comcast's engineering department would sort things out right quick.
Re:Wait, you have ASTC TVs? (Score:5, Informative)
U.S. digital cable is not ATSC (8-VSB modulation) over-the-air broadcast signal compatible. Instead, the main MPEG2 payload is carried in 64-QAM or 256-QAM modulation, within RF channels that fit the usual US-standard 6 MHz spacing. Alongside this, are one or more "out-of-band" carriers that use a different modulation format and lower data rate, that carry channel maps and other administrative information. Finally, there is an upstream (settop box to head-end) channel in RF bands lower in frequency than the downstream RF, that is used for administrative purposes and for pay-per-view.
The signal structures are described in published standards freely available from SCTE. The out-of-band and reverse channels have two different standards, reflecting the original developments by General Instrument (now Motorola) of one standard, and by Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) of the other.
Much (but not all) of the content is covered by "conditional access" (encryption), the details of which are of course unpublished.
Re:advice: (Score:3, Informative)
...who said there was no other solution and I had to pay $3 per month for each box.
About the third line of the second quoted section.
Re:This is the box you're looking for (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.vecima.com/products.php?line=1026&item=1083 [vecima.com]
Disclaimer: I work for Vecima networks, but this system does do exactly what you want, and is already being used in that capacity in many other places, including some hotels.
Re:advice: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly where in the 'article' is the information about Comcast charging? It's not.
Last time I used cable, the box came free with the service. If you wanted a better box, you paid more. ($10 more for HD, or DVR, or HD-DVR. Yeah, they were all the same.)
You are partially correct. Comcast charges a per box fee past 4 boxes. If you only have 4 TVs, no extra fee.
STB per TV may be your best option (Score:5, Informative)
I actually work for a TV company... might be able to give a little insight.
Most headends for hotels, hospitals and the like are comprised of a rack of STBs, each tuned to a specific channel. The output is modulated as an RF signal and combined with all the others, so the incoming digital signal is effectively converted to analog for redistribution on the local coax network.
So, if you're wanting to display more than 32 services, you'll need at least that many STBs at your analog headend. You'll also need to manage the infrastructure to distribute it to the six buildings, which would probably mean running underground cables underground, and if there is any sort of distance you'd need some RF amplifiers. You might be able to get around some of that using something like a slingbox over IP, but again, added cost.
Finally, there's the management aspect. What happens if a channel moves to another channel number? You'll have to retune the box. If a box goes down for any reason, you'll have to replace it as the channel will be knocked out. And one of the less fun aspects of managing a TV system is that people treat it as a utility... if it's down, expect to get a call, even at 3AM.
If I were you, I'd push your cable company to donate STBs in order to keep your relationship rosy. That way, no $3/month fee (which does seem wrong based on your agreement), and none of the buildout/management headaches.
Best of luck.
Re:Place them "elsewhere" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hotels (Score:3, Informative)
On a side note: Im not sure about commercial settings, but in residential settings, anything affixed to your house, you own. the only thing the utilities own is the wire in the air/under ground running to your house. They like to pretend they own the wire on the house at times, but if its fixed to the home, its YOURS. I have been in the cable and satellite business for 2+ years as an installer. On another note, although not commonly used the size of the cable is sufficient description when referring to Coax line, although soft line cable (RG 58, RG 59, RG 6, RG 11) is better refereed to by the name (ie RG x) where as hard line can be refereed to by many different terms.
Re:Are they all tuned to the same channel? (Score:5, Informative)
This is how we offer TV service to our dorms.
We have 1 box per 2 channels of directTV (or dishnetwork I can't recall which). Each one pushes out to a tv channel that their TV can tune in to watch.
We offer 30 channels so we have 15 boxes.
Re:This is the box you're looking for (Score:2, Informative)
MDTA (Score:5, Informative)
First, disclaimers. I don't work for Comcast, but I do consult to them. I don't speak for Comcast in any way. I am under NDA, so I can't give you the sort of specific technical information you need. There may be any number of reasons why this thing wouldn't work in your circumstances, or why Comcast wouldn't choose to provide you one.
Having said all of that, you might want to look into the MDTA [multichannel.com]. It's the "solution" you're sure exists ;-)
It is POSSIBLE that one of these could be connected to your 1 inch (probably 850) hardline. But be aware that it doesn't mix with digital video services, though CableModems and MTAs work fine when hung off of it.
-Peter
Re:Being ridiculous (Score:1, Informative)
I have nice, new, digital TV's in my house. Comcast's digital conversion was working just fine for me without any kind of box, until they decided that unencrypted digital channels were bad. So now I have to run the stupid D-to-A converter on my expensive TV to get channels that I'm already paying for, and that used to be available on that TV before they began to encrypt. Despite what they tell you, it is a ploy to up-sell you into renting a full digital tuner box or DVR. Because of their implementation, the over-the-air HD channels that I used to get in nice, wide-screen format are now "boxed". My alternative would be to put an A/B switch in and either get the OTA's right off the cable or from an antenna. Yuck!
Re:Are they all tuned to the same channel? (Score:3, Informative)
>>>that the TV's QAM receiver is incapable of uncompressing it?
QAM is perfectly capable of receiving the signal and uncompressing it, just the same way my ATSC receiver receives channel 35 and uncompresses it into Mind, Global, Link, and the Extra channels. It's part of the standard. In fact there still are a few unscrambled QAM signals that people watch. It's only the scrambled ones that require the box.
Re:Wait, you have ASTC TVs? (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Isn't digital cable ASTC compatible if it is not encrypted?
Yes and no. ATSC chips are designed for the dual purpose of interpreting both the 8/16VSB and QAM signals. The question is whether or not the engineer enabled the QAM capability. In most cases the answer is yes but not always.
Re:Place them "elsewhere" (Score:2, Informative)
100W per box is way high; the model Comcast gave me (the Motorola DTA100) uses 5.37 watts while on, per the manufacturer [motorola.com]. Not nothing, but over an order of magnitude better than you're claiming.
My cable box, what looks like a Motorola DCT3416 (don't have the unit in front of me) uses about 40W of power whether the unit is on or not. Neither Motorola nor the cable company care about the fact that it adds $4 per month to the power bill. Nor do they care that the UI is an utter disaster. For example, to turn on or off Closed captioning, you have to turn off the unit, press menu, and access it in the service menu. You can't just use the TV's CC decoder because it's garbled on digital channels from the box.
Re:Hotels (Score:3, Informative)
That is incorrect. Comcast encrypts virtually all channels, so a standard ClearQAM tuner that is available on the television set will not work. Comcast will require an external box for all their channels (they may not today for OTA channels, but they will as of 2012 when they are legally allowed to encrypt EVERYTHING).
Re:Are they all tuned to the same channel? (Score:2, Informative)
The word people are omitting is "encryption". Most MSOs will encrypt everything they legally can. This means the only thing you can see without a cable box or cablecard are broadcast channels. And the FCC have been pussing out and granting wavers to encrypt those too.
Re:Hotels (Score:3, Informative)
>>>If all you had to do was buy TVs with built-in digital tuners -- you'd be fine. But because Comcast ENCRYPTS THEIR CABLE TV CHANNELS... you can't.
Comcast sucks
Comsucks.
Re:Are they all tuned to the same channel? (Score:3, Informative)
That will effectively force people to upgrade to Comcast TV or Comcast Internet" in order to get decent television.
It can't force anyone to do anything. Watching TV is not a necessity of life and thus there is nothing forcing you to continue buying it other than one's own choice to do so.
Re:Are they all tuned to the same channel? (Score:3, Informative)
No, madam, the basic digital signals are encrypted nowadays. It's not compression, not intended to compress anything.