The Mandate for High Availability Video Programming

As digital broadband technologies continue to evolve, the market for delivery of standard definition and high definition digital television programming to the residential subscriber is becoming increasingly competitive. Depending on their geographical location, a digital TV customer might be able to choose among a number of service providers, including cable companies, telecom companies with DSL or Passive Optical Networks, satellite companies, and companies delivering services over wireless broadband, such as WiMax or WiFi.

The key to maximizing customer satisfaction and controlling support costs is to build a highly reliable end-to-end infrastructure that has redundancy and resiliency comparable to that of the traditional POTS telephone network, which is generally regarded as being 99.999% reliable (a.k.a., five 9’s of availability). As will be explained in a subsequent section of this white paper, in order to achieve end-to-end availability of 99.999%, each type of element on the end-to-end path between the signal source and the subscriber (Figure 1) needs to be available more than 99.999% of the time.