WITH THE WORLDWIDE CABLE TV industry in a race to offer a three-screen service that includes HDTV sets, broadband-connected PCs, and follows subscribers around during the day on cell phones, it’s expected that strong, continued growth will continue on the cable TV infrastructure spending side, says market research firm In-stat.
Global sales will rise from about US$925.4 million during 2006 to more than US$2.1 billion in 2010, says an In-stat report.
"The cable TV industry is working diligently to connect all the infrastructure dots in the race to provision a three-screen telecommunications service," said Gerry Kaufhold, In-Stat analyst.
"System operators are building out super headends and upgrading local headends to provide the economies of scale needed to provide the greatest number of services, over the greatest geographical reach, at the lowest possible cost. Fixed mobile convergence, or FMC, will become a fast-growing market for cable operators, and they will disrupt the cell phone industry."
Other parts of the report say:
* High definition TV services and video on demand are expanding, driving plant upgrades for improved gigabit ethernet video switches, switched digital video (SDV), more QAM channels, and widening deployments of 1 GHz Final Mile equipment.
* Modular cable modem termination systems (modular CMTS) and wide band cable modems are being brought into play to upgrade high speed data services to compete against telephone companies’ ADSL, VDSL, and fibre to the home.
* Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner and Advance/Newhouse have a joint venture with Sprint Nextel that will begin offering cable-branded cellular phone services later this year in the US. Later on, fixed mobile convergence will add innovative video services and wireless extensions to the cable TV infrastructure, and disrupt the cell phone market.
