Faster Internet coming to Nelson County

By Bryan Gentry

Published: August 18, 2008

Clearer pictures, faster Internet access and a video-on-demand service are on their way to Nelson County Cablevision customers later this year as the company upgrades its electronic “head end” system.

The new equipment uses a video compression technique to provide digital programming without using up as much bandwidth, said Chief Operating Officer John Holman.

The bandwidth that is saved is used for a variety of services.

“The speed’s going to increase on our Internet once we get the head end up and running,” in four to six weeks, Holman said.

Digital and high definition channels, along with the video-on-demand service, could be available in late October, he said.

Customers do not need any new equipment themselves unless they want to subscribe to the new services.

The cost of upgrading to a digital and high definition system can be prohibitive for a small cable system. Holman said the equipment alone usually costs $60,000 per channel. It sometimes requires wire to be replaced, costing $50,000 per mile.

On top of that, independent cable providers usually have to pay more for programming, since they don’t buy in bulk like large operators do, Holman said.

Nelson County Cablevision was one of more than 100 independent cable companies that attended a trade show in Florida in July to discuss those issues and ways to reduce cable costs to customers.

While there, the company learned about a head end system produced by Beyond Broadband Technologies.

The head end is the equipment that receives programming from a satellite and distributes it to a cable company’s customers.

The BBT head end uses MPEG-4 video compression to deliver four digital channels on bandwidth normally taken up by one.

Holman said it costs less than other means of upgrading but he did not know the exact cost. His company ordered the equipment while at the show.

The hardware should arrive in September, Holman said. The company will randomly select 25 customers to receive new cable boxes for testing.

Depending on how those tests go, all Nelson County Cable customers could be able to subscribe to the new services by the end of October, Holman said.

While still receiving additional analog channels, customers could subscribe to a digital plan with 130 digital channels or a plan with 25 high-definition channels.

High-definition is a better grade of digital, while standard digital is a step up from analog.

The bandwidth saved by the MPEG-4 compression will allow Nelson County Cablevision to offer a video-on-demand service.

“It’s like a video library,” Holman said. “You’re not dictated by what time they say this is going to run. You can browse through (it) and choose what you want, anytime you want.”

In the future, that bandwidth could be used for digital telephone service, home security monitoring or services that haven’t even been invented, Holman said.

The company is already in the process of upgrading its network with fiber cable through county neighborhoods.

“We’ve done the majority of that. We have fiber in almost every neighborhood now,” Holman said. That upgrade is halfway through on Wintergreen Mountain, he said.

In addition to discovering new equipment, at the Independent Show in Florida the company discussed ways to make programming cheaper for cable companies.

“The independents are coming together to try to have the same buying power from the programmers that DirecTV and Comcast do,” Holman said.

They are banding together because as a group they already represent the third largest purchaser of television programming, he said.