How Do Fiber Optics and Cable Television Work?

Fiber Optic cable along with the old common (coaxial or RF) cable are two different cable system technologies that can be used to distribute various services to get rid of users--homes. In general, they differ only in technical (electrical/communication) point of view. This is mainly necessary for the network operators because customers or viewers don't worry about the technology, they may be considering services and TV channels.

There are few different ways you can use to distribute common services like tv stations via cable networks. Each has some advantages and disadvantages and requires different topology or network infrastructure.

Analog Television

The first wire networks were simply extra time with the broadcasts in the air. This was implemented by deploying ordinary antenna cable (though lower losses) through the cable system headend to the homes. Because with the distances there was also many amplifiers at specific points to be sure required signal levels. The communication was exclusively one-way, but later most such cable networks were extended to permit bidirectional communication required for access for the internet through the use of systems like DocSys.

This approach can be utilized with RF (coaxial) and fiber cables. Fiber optic cables may also be utilized in certain cases to distribute the old analog wire. The advantage of optical network is because it may use available fibers in existing fiber optic cables as well as the cable losses are extremely low.

Digital Television

Digital television in cable networks could be divided into two totally different methods of distribution. The first one is an equivalent to digital broadcasting along with the other way mainly used in fiber optic networks is IP television.

Digital Cable Broadcasting

This is comparable to analog distribution over (RF) cable but digital signal. The same technology (modulation) can be utilized in terms of terrestrial broadcasting in fact, there are more efficient systems that take into account specific properties of cable systems. One typical example is DVB-T system which is used in Europe for digital terrestrial video broadcasting but cables use similar DVB-C system.

IP Television

This is regarded as the popular digital television distribution used in combination with fiber optic cable systems. It means distributing TV channels using the IP protocol which is the backbone of internet communications. Each TV channels is encoded with either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 system after which distributed over fiber optical cable network on the homes. The advantages are enormous. The capacity for your variety of channels is quite high, every one of the channels can be encoded and distributed with very high quality, it is rather all to easy to distribute HD channels, access on the internet really is easy because from the IP protocol and native technology.