A new wrinkle in the tale of TV vs. Telephone.

January 23, 2001 6:44 AM

A new wrinkle in the tale of TV vs. Telephone. Cable TV over your phone lines? I doubt it will fly, but who knows?
posted by jpoulos (4 comments total)

Hmm.. well, with Dish Network, you can get a whole bunch of channels, HDTV and internet, although you'll need three different dishes, but hey, it works I suppose.

I really doubt I'd feel comfortable getting my tv through the phone line, because, in my area phone lines are crappy. But, then, I have a high standard, I call in and yell at the technician guy for having DD5.1 track drop off at certain points of a feature and such. heh.
posted by tiaka at 6:51 AM on January 23, 2001

In the UK, cable has only really arrived in the past five years. The cable companies have had to compete with a well-established satellite network (Rupert Murdoch's Sky)
and one of the main selling points has been to offer phone service in addition to TV. In fact, my family dropped the cable TV a while back, and kept the phone line. (And now I get cable internet from them, so we're all happy...)
posted by holgate at 7:08 AM on January 23, 2001

Hmm, where I am, it's the reverse. Our local cable television company (AT&T) is trying to get people to drop regular phone service via Verizen to move to AT&T digital phone service which presumably runs through the broadband lines that they use to deliver cable TV and cable modem access.

I find the whole thing odd, but then I have a dish and a T1 and rarely make actual voice calls, so I'm out of the loop.
posted by Dreama at 9:25 AM on January 23, 2001

Cable-over-TV is nothing new. It's mostly been used in places where it would be too expensive to install new cable lines, or where the local Bell is trying to introduce token competition to pre-existing cable service. As noted, quality has been an issue.

This story is about cable AND dsl over POTS.
posted by dhartung at 1:28 PM on January 23, 2001