kriston's Journal: Why Cox Cable's video service is stupid

Here's the stupid thing about Cox Cable Television in the Northern VA area.

Technicians are going crazy yanking old cable off the telephone poles to install multi-wavelength fiber and switched-video-compatible boxes because they ran out of bandwidth to compete with all the HD channels that the other services, like FiOS and satellite, offer.

The stupid thing is that FiOS has the same 1 gigahertz video capacity that cable does (not including Video-on-Demand which is served by Internet on FiOS and through hidden video channels by Cox). Likewise, FiOS has twice the SD channels and HD channels without the need for switched-video to solve a perceived bandwidth problem.

This doesn't make sense. I did some digging. For now I still use cable internet so I scanned the Cox Cable signal on my HDTV and found out that nearly all of Cox Cable's SD channels are still analog. This means that most of Cox Cable's 1 gigahertz of bandwidth is consumed by analog channels at 6 MHz per channel, even though you can fit more than 10 digital channels in one analog channel if they were to use digital instead.

Why is Cox Cable spending so much money installing switched-video if all this bandwidth is available?
Why isn't Cox Cable using digital for their SD channels?

Apparently the bandwidth required for Video-on-Demand is the business reason for the switched-video upgrade, but switched-video is not just for VoD. It is also used on non-VoD channels because of a system-wide bandwidth shortage on Cox Cable. This means if nobody in a neighborhood watches Food Network HD, it gets turned off until someone tunes it in again.

The cause of the problem is that Cox Cable is still using 6-MHz-per-channel analog for most SD channels.