Originally Posted by bigRoN
That is because SureWest is not a CABLE company. SureWest is a telephone/network access company that provides video services over it's network, while companies like Comcast are a cable company that provides telephone/network access over it's cable system. Initially SureWest was just a telephone company. To the consumer, they tend to blend together, but technologically speaking, they are like comparing apples to oranges.
Originally Posted by boomheadshot45
Sorry for the late reply but that's stupid. They both offer Cable to their customers why is one given carte blanche and the other has to adhere to strick rules? I understand how they differ but the endproduct they offer is still the same. It's just really frustrating.
"Cable TV" is a content delivery system that uses radio frequencies. In "Cable TV", nearly all the channels delivered are all being broadcasted over the cable at the same time. Are you currently watching all 200+ channels at the same time? Of course not, so bandwidth (carrying capacity of the delivery system) is wasted.
A long time ago, cable TV was essentially like an antenna cable that carried all the channels you could have gotten had you lived at the top of a mountain and picked up all the broadcasters signals; essentially an antenna replacement for people that lived in areas where antennas couldn't pick up much due to buildings or topography (hills and valleys). This progressed into adding a few channels that WEREN'T broadcasted via TV station transmitters. These channels that weren't broadcasted over TV station transmitters grew exponentially with use of satellites providing channels to cable companies. Cable companies have tried to make money by charging you money for each additional TV in the house through telling you that you had to have a cable box provided by them; especially after the amount of channels got up to about 50-60 channels. To combat the bandwidth assigned to televisions, cable companies started to alter how much bandwidth each channel used from the "over-the-air" standard. Laws governing this industry mandated that consumers shouldn't have to pay to watch "free" channels (after their monthly fee that is), so television manufacturers started making cable-ready televisions, that by-passed the need to rent a cable box... at least for "free" channels. They used some rudimentary encryption techniques to block the paid channels, unless you paid for them and had a cable box. As these "free" and paid channels grew, they were running out of bandwidth, so they went to digitizing and compressing the channels. If they ONLY digitized and compressed premium channels, there wouldn't be any mandation to provide CableCARDs, but due to digitizing and compressing "free" channels and allowing people to not be forced to rent a cable box, CableCARDs came out to convert these channels on some newer televisions. Due to the CableCARDs identifying who they were, you could actually watch all you subscribed channels, not JUST the "free" channels.
NOW, lets look at how SureWest operates. Sure, SureWest provides most of the same channels as cable television companies, but their delivery system is totally different. SureWest uses data packet switching to provide everything they offer, very different to radio frequency. Internally, cable companies use similar technology to shift content around, but the connection to the house for cable remains on radio frequencies, while SureWest delivers fiber... carrying IP data packets. Instead of sending everything to everyone all the time, these packets are routed only to where they are needed, a much more efficient method. While cable may have up to 1,000 Mbps of data streaming, the same information goes to everyone. SureWest delivers a dedicated 100 Mbps to each subscriber, going in both ways. They divide that 100 Mbps into different "zones". You have one zone for your broadband Internet connection... I currently pay for 15 Mbps. 100-15=85 Mbps remaining. While I don't use SureWest's phone service, a small sliver is designated for Voice-over-IP; I doubt it is even 1 Mbps. The remainder is used for video streaming. With SureWest, they only send you the channel your tuner is set to. As an analogy, think of YouTube. There are thousands, if not millions of videos on YouTube. You go and select one to watch, then that video streams to your computer. This is a very similar concept to how video is delivered by SureWest, only it uses a piece of hardware similar to a cable box that does the work instead of your computer. If you are watching a high definition channel on SureWest on one channel, it will use up about 8 Mbps (I don't know the actual bandwidth of the MPEG4 streams, but when they used MPEG2, HD channels took up to 18-20 Mbps. This technology of providing video content over IP switching is IPTV.
Just like the rules to shipping stuff by air, water, train or truck vary, so do content delivery. Policing agencies vary by each of these.... Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, railroad police and highway patrol. All of these delivery methods are ways to get stuff to you, but they abide by different rules. Cable television, satellite television and IPTV are all different delivery systems, so they each have their own rules. CableCARDs only apply to cable television... they don't apply to either satellite or IPTV.