Current efforts for digital data transmission over hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) networks will provide an efficient data transport mechanism in the last mile to residential users and will enable a very large number of services to the home. Provision of these services requires a complete end-to-end network architecture that provides an efficient connection between the server and the end-user. Thus, it is necessary for the currently isolated HFC islands to gradually evolve into an efficient, highly connected, high-speed network. In this paper, we review HFC networks and establish that they provide a more attractive and promising solution than the alternatives for last mile connectivity to the home, such as telephone connections. We present a list of broadband services that are possible due to the high-speed data capabilities of HFC networks and describe the necessary end-to-end infrastructure to support these applications as well as possible evolution and migration paths for developing these end-to-end network architectures.
By: Chatschik Bisdikian, Kiyoshi Maruyama, David I. Seidman, and Dimitrios N. Serpanos
Published in: RC20568 in 1996
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