Modern Cable Television Technology, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12 Linear Fiber-Optic Signal Transportation

12.1 Introduction

Although coaxial cable is used for the “last mile” delivery of broadband services to subscribers, other technologies are frequently used to cover most of the physical distance between headend and tap. One reason for this is that the interrelationship between bandwidth, signal levels, number of cascaded devices, noise, and distortion (discussed in Chapter 11) limits the size of purely coaxial systems. Second, large coaxial systems are best suited to delivery of a common spectrum of signals to all parts of the network, whereas many services, such as data communications and telephony, require a bidirectional bandwidth allocation to every customer. In order to provide this capacity ...