Tidal Takeout Of Hawaiian TV Signal
Just as well there are other things to do in Hawaii
Over 400,000 customers of Oceanic Time Warner Cable in the US state of Hawaii had temporary outages of Internet tv, phone and cable television signals on Tuesday due to a break in a deep water undersea fiber-optic cable in the Molokai Channel.
The service that was lost at about 1 a.m. Tuesday was restored on Oahu and Kauai about two hours later, while service was back up on Maui and the Big Island by Tuesday afternoon, the company said.
Repairs to the cable, about 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, will have to wait until a cable-laying ship arrives in three weeks, OTWC Vice President Norman Santos stated. He added that the company didn’t expect to learn the cause of the problem until that time. The cable leased by Oceanic and other companies is owned by TW Telecom Inc.
Meanwhile, Maui County officials reported its office phones with the prefix 270 were expected to be back in service by Wednesday morning. The county’s service provider is Wavecom Solutions. Hawaiian Telcom, Hawaii’s largest telephone company, said it wasn’t affected by the outage.
The situation as a whole, though, brings up the question: Why are we all in the process of ridding ourselves completely of analouge signals, when they are a useful backup in situations such as this?
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I think a more appropriate question would be: Why is there not more redundancy built using radio infrastructure?
Broadcast TV is now encoded using digital techniques. The analog broadcast technology of 50 years ago is dying. This is partly due to increased demand for a limited band of frequencies.
I receive my internet service from a point-to-point wireless link broadcast from a transmitter many miles away. Microwave point-to-point has excellent range and bandwidth for data backhaul.
Why would you think that analog would be better? It uses the available bandwidth (over any transport media) in a much less efficient manner than a digital signal (which is often also compressed).
P2P Microwave is a completely reasonable solution for some of the shots. I am not sure of the distances though, and keep in mind that weather effects like fog can greatly degrade a microwave signal.