Jooles,
In Ireland the cable networks date from a similar era and have the same aluminum junction boxes and cable mains running along the front of houses jumping across side entrances from building to building or even along back garden walls.
They also carried FM radio as well as a mix of free-to-air and encrypted tv channels in plain old PAL.
However, the networks were mostly never designed for real 2-way communication.
When NTL bought out the cable network in Dublin, Galway, Waterford and a few other places, they promised to upgrade the infrastructure to provide broadband and telephony but it never happened. In fact, they ran out of cash so badly that most of the network wasn't even upgraded to digital tv!!
Our other major cable company, Chorus, was in similar dire financial straits and failed to do anything to update their creeking old cable networks.
In the mean time, Sky Digital launched a service specially targeted at the Irish market carrying all of the local network television (RTE1, RTE2, TV3 and TG4) as well as BBC 1 and 2 Northern Ireland.. along with the same vast number of other channels carried in their UK offering. They also launched Sky News Ireland and broadcast versions of Sky One, Sky Sports and MTV and others that carry Irish ads only. The system, being digital, offered sound and picture quality that was suitable for modern widescreen / home cinema systems.
Meanwhile the cable companies didn't really react at all. The cork cable network, for the most part, couldn't even provide stereo sound and suffered from fuzzy pictures and the odd crackle due to its 1970s US cable encryption systems!
Anyway, the net result was Sky's offering was light years ahead of the cable cos... they lost vast number of customers and lost money like there was no tomorrow. Both of their parent companies went into extreme financial difficulty and the Irish operations were cash starved and have pretty much never recovered.
Cable telephony and internet access is only available in a very select few areas. In other places it was launched, then shut down again due to the high cost of upgrading the system.
So, the regulator has had to concentrate on opening-up the phone network to as much competition as possible.
Some new housing developments and apartment blocks that are near MAN "Metropolitan Area Networks" (publically funded fiber systems) are now wired for direct-to-home fiber systems and get fully inteactive tv, video on demand and very high speed internet access from Smart Telecom, but it's limited to a few areas.
NTL and Chorus have been upgrading bits of their cable nets but it's a very slow process due to the sheer scale of the cable systems (they pass almost all urban homes).
[This message has been edited by djk (edited 04-27-2005).]
