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Our Group:

Gerald Kresta

Matt McGovern

Kelly Orman

John Verbeke

Cable telephony is the application of technology allowing media service providers to provide telephone services across coaxial cable wires, the traditional infrastructure for delivering Cable TV to homes and businesses.  The technology, hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) networks, is a technology in which fiber-optic cable and coaxial cable are used in different portions of a network to carry broadband content such as video, data and voice traffic.  A local Cable TV company might use fiber-optic cable from the distribution center to serving nodes located close to business and residential users and then use coaxial cable to deliver the signal "the last mile" to the end-user.  Thus, a single coaxial cable into the home could potentially be split into several different phone numbers, Cable TV service, and an open internet portal many times faster than the current 56K dial-up connection. 

Because of the removal of the traditional regulatory barriers separating local and long-distance telephony, cable TV operation, and internet service delivery, traditional telephony service is converging with Cable TV service and data transmission for the internet.  This convergence of technologies provides service providers and consumers with the new ability to combine multiple services along a single facilty on one bill.  The capabilities of this newly converged bundle of services even surpasses the quality of each individual service when used stand-alone.

A leading competing technology with HFC is voice delivery over the internet using H.323, the leading internet protocol for handling voice traffic.  Delivery of voice traffic over the internet has not yet been perfected as traffic over the internet is handled in packets.  Should a voice transmission packet be delivered without its closely following packet, the result in voice communication could be choppy or unintelligible.  Once voice IP traffic is fully perfected, cable operators will begin to offer IP telephony service (as opposed to circuit-switched telephony service that AT&T is trialing in California).