HD junkie

Man, I am an HD junkie. I actually watch more television programming now cause it's in HD. Even commercials are worth watching when they're in HD and 5.1. Granted we only have the minimum HD offering from TW cable (analog basic, CBS HD, NBC HD, ABC HD, FOX HD, and PBS HD with Motorola HD DVR, and cable card), there's enough HD content to satisfy for now. Most of the quality HD programming occurs during primetime and weekend sports. The quality of cable HD is hit-and-miss largely due to compression used by both cable and satellite providers. Compression is one of the reasons why I always thought digital TV sets never looked very good at the big box stores (garbage in, garbage out). Hopefully, the transition to MPEG4 will improve things. Actually, DirectTV has an MPEG4 DVR/STB out now so I'm waiting to hear from users if PQ has improved. What's going to make this more interesting is if/when IPTV will gain traction (ie AT&T Project Lightspeed & Verizon's FIOS).

The city we live in is very unique in that it has a municipally owned symmetrical fiber-optic network capable of 10Gbps at the core and 1Gbps at the end nodes. It uses Allied Telesis' (boo!) fiber-to-the-home product line, which includes switches and routers. The offerings are 5Mpbs for $29.99, 10Mpbs for $50, and 15Mbps for $100. I actually know the Network admin as he use to work as a support engineer at my company. When we first moved in, there were a good number of network outages. It got to a point where I even ordered Verizon 768K DSL as a back up line. But for the past year, the fiber network has been rock solid..much more robust than even Comcast cable at my mom's house. I'm actually waiting to see if we'll get IPTV here but I suppose there are still challenges as described in this older BW article.