21581 - SCTE Broadband August2022 COMPLETE v1

88 Vol. 44 No. 3 - September 2022 Issue from the archive Mr. Fabich: Are you referring to cable or to amplifiers? Mr. Kharbanda: To the complete network. Mr. Fabich: We have radiation regulations which are quite similar to the German ones. We have never succeeded in measuring these leakages, but in principle we do have similar regulations. Mr. R. J. Seacombe (Visionhire Cable): Mr. Fabich, can you give us a little more insight into how you intend to use glass fibre links? Will these links be owned by Telekabel, or will they belong to the PTT? Also, what system of transmission will be used? Will you use one fibre per programme with digital transmission, or will it be an analogue system? Mr. Fabich: In answer to your first question, our system technically is licensed by the PTT and, therefore, the PTT controls what we do. At the moment they are getting terribly nervous as to what we are going to do in taking out just one glass fibre. As the technical manager I feel that if we put the glass fibre either into the trunk or into the subscriber's premises it must be a digital transmission. Commercially speaking we have no reason for putting the optical fibre into the trunk, into the subscriber loop or outlet. Why do I say that? My personal feeling is that when you put in glass fibre it will be an integrated system of digital speech, digital TV, digital data, digital text, and so on, and then all the PTTs in the world will not allow private companies to operate, such as TV distribution, and they will try to regain the territory they have lost. Perhaps that is only in Austria. They have opened up once to private operators for cable TV. There will be optical fibre systems, and you have heard of the German system with two fibres from the last exchange. Our sister company Germany is working on that, but we regard that purely as the TV business. We are very happy to have our TV distribution with the three-stage co- axial network and we hope that we will go on for another 30 years. Even if you asked for my technical advice, I could not recommend even to put one metre of glass fibre into the ground today, because if I have to use it commercially for 30 years I do not know which type of glass and which type of amplifier, etc. However, we are a small country and we have not got the problem of a national electronics industry which should export and which should be in the forefront with regard to development; we can just look at what happens around us. Mr. M. A. E. Butler (Philips Video): Mr. Fabich, since you are allowed to distribute German programmes, what is the position about distributing programmes from OTS, if this satellite company gets going? Mr. Fabich: We acknowledge that the OTS satellite is not a direct broadcasting satellite, but a communications satellite. So we think that only the PTT are allowed to receive those programmes. We said to the PTT, "Buy a reception station and give us as cable TV operators in Austria, and specifically in Vienna, the decoded programmes." The PTT agreed to do that, except for one point. By Austrian law the cable distributors are only allowed to distribute programmes which are already broadcast. Now, as we have agreed, the OTS is not broadcasting, because it is a communications satellite. We hope that in three or four months there will be a transmitter in Malta. That means that the OTS programmes go to Malta and are transmitted by a terrestrial TV transmitter. So it is then broadcasting and it does not matter for our laws where it is broadcasting! So we are a very happy country. (Laughter) Mr. Butler: Mr. Heightman, if the proposals in relation to cable are ultimately for a national type of system, obviously it will be quite a different situation to what we have at the moment, where each cable company has been able to put in its own system and have whatever type of receiver it likes at the end of the line. There is obviously an interface problem at both ends of the system, particularly if it is two-way. What do you think the problem is going to be in terms of getting some sort of standardisation for this? Mr. Heightman: Not knowing the views of the companies directly involved, it is a little difficult to answer the question. I was surprised to find fairly heavy support for the co-axial system in the Information Technology Advisory Panel's report. I also noted that they wanted to appoint a technical committee, and certainly that committee is going to take some very short cuts if they are going to obtain suitable answers in a short time. Otherwise I see it running as it has for many years; in other words, every town has its own system and it is the interface that becomes important. Of course, those towns that look into the future sufficiently will be putting in maximum channel capacity up to 30 channels as soon as they can. The exact means of doing it is not vital, provided that receivers normally bought or hired off-the-shelf can be readily connected. I think that one has to take that view and, taking my growth curve in the UK, with the best will in the world I would guess that in the first five years we shall not only be putting in new installations in the order of perhaps 200,000 a year, but we shall have to update a similar number, and it is quite evident that that is going to take us at least five years to do. So the overall answer is probably the usual English one of compromise, with the ultimate hope that standardisation will come along, because that is vital from a manufacturing point of view. If we are ever going to get large scale manufacture in the UK of cable and equipment, then we must have some sort of standardisation. The only other point is the relevance of optical fibres. In the trunk side and the links, that is all right, but the distribution aspect is a bit trickier. I am already reacting against digital in favour of analogue for cost reasons. It can be shown that over short distances of three to five kilometres the intensity modulation of LEDs is a much more economic proposition than high power lasers with their attendant unreliability. So I still see that as a question to which the ITAP technical committee will have to find some answers in the context of final decisions on a system for the UK. Mr. D. Howe (Philips): I wonder whether either of the speakers would like to comment on the development of the cable system in Japan and do they have any experience of that? Mr. Fabich: I am sorry, I cannot. I just do not know what they are doing. Mr. Heightman: I did refer earlier to the Hi- Ovis experiment which took place about two or three years ago. I believe that this has almost closed down, but there were about 170 homes involved, each with a separate fibre that was intensity modulated. I forget the name of the company who developed the LEDs and the system for the purpose, but it was a two-way system, with one fibre in and another one out, and it included a camera in each home. The question seemed to be more one of proving the engineering capability than one of overall cost. The initial investigation showed the cost to be prohibitive. The only one I know of where the cost was quoted was in Manitoba, Canada, where a figure of ten times the cost of a co-axial system was quoted for direct distribution. Again, that was fairly small scale, but it was ten times too high. In the case of the Milton Keynes experiment, cost was not the vital consideration, it being carried out by British Telecom; it was a case of proving the system. Mr. Howe : It is very interesting, I think, that the statistics which are published do not refer to the situation in Japan. I really wondered why that was, in view of the fact that the density of population obviously lends itself very readily to this. Mr. Heightman: Yes. In fact we did have an executive in Japan recently and I asked him to try and find out what had happened to this Hi-Ovis experiment, but he was unable to do so. He spoke to some well-known companies and they were unable to tell him. So I am still wondering what the outcome of the experiment was, apart from the fact that there is a technical paper which says that the reliability over a two-year period was excellent, with no problems. That was a switched system, by the way, with one fibre and no joints. Mr. A. Burke (Visionhire Cable): Mr . Heightman, have you any more information on security systems on cable in the United States? We hear that there is quite a movement towards the more sophisticated addressable systems. I wondered the extent to which companies over there are spending fairly large amounts of money to move from some of the simpler trap type security systems to the addressable variety? Mr. Heightman: I do not have much information currently on the system to which I referred. It was a short visit and there was no-one around with the engineering capability to answer my questions, even if they had been prepared to. In terms of addressable systems, the development is going very, very slowly. One or two companies do have addressable systems, particularly related to what they call the tiering of subscription payments, i.e. the number of channels they have, at different rates of subscription. I am hoping to get a great deal more information, but at this moment I am lacking information on the system that is used. I have mentioned in my paper that the overall question of the collection of the money, scrambling, and so on, are things which this technical committee wants to consider very carefully. Those of us who have been involved in pilot experiments have found various problems with the multitude of different systems coming out of the USA. For pilot purposes you are almost bound to go to the USA for your headend coding and decoding equipment, and this is a very big problem, because virtually every manufacturer you talk to has a different system. Of course, the scrambling system should be fairly unbreakable, but on the other hand they have taken this rather too far in terms of reducing production quantities to very small numbers. In this connection, I think the BBC have not yet decided what they are going to do about scrambling their second satellite channel. Here again, this is a vital one for the cable industry and it needs a great deal of study. Mr. Burke: Quite obviously the important aspect in this respect is the extent of pirating, and that is the object of the trap or decoder in the first place. On your visit were you able to obtain any information with regard to this? Mr. Heightman: Yes, it is remarkably small, even with the simple systems, and it is considerably lower than one per cent. In fact I visited a fairly big company on Long Island who keep statistics. It is very difficult finding out, of course, and it is like checking the by-passing of the electricity meter when people are actually doing it, but their statistics showed something like 0.2 per cent - it was very, very low. They were using a square wave sync. suppression system. Mr. Kharbanda: Could I ask Mr. Heightman to comment on the relative popularity of subscription television in America compared with pay television? I believe that in a number of areas the MDS system prevails with subscription television. The total numbers of people, of comm. are much less on subscription television compared with pay-TV, but in the areas where there is subscription television how does the relative popularity compare? Mr. Heightman: This is really a question of how does the satellite experiment, if 1 can call it that, compare with cable? My experience is that it 32 Cable Television Engineering