Upgrading an Existing System from MATV to SMATV (cont.)
Operations
This property was constructed in two phases by two different contractors. The first phase had every drop in each apartment unit run back to the wiring closet at the end of the building. For a two-bedroom apartment, you could have either three or four coaxial lines in the main wiring closet on the ground floor.
In the average building in phase one, you could expect to find anywhere
between
48 and 64 unmarked cables in the closet.
This makes installs an absolute nightmare because of the signal splitting required to cover the multiple drops to each apartment, and the additional time spent making sure that you actually have the right drops in the first place. It is our hope that the contactor who designed and installed the system in phase one has taken up a career that better matches its wiring aptitude, such as lawn care or taxidermy.
The result was that first we had to clean up the mess that we inherited. We did this by toning (tracing the cables by generating a tone in each apartment) and labeling the cables in phase one.
We also replaced the cheap and incorrectly installed coax fittings. Once we cleaned up the network and corrected the design flaws, the system became easier to manage and of course provides better subscriber service.
As a part of the cleanup, we decided to build an installer-friendly system. Since all tier changes are trap dependant (that is, not programmed into the set-top box), an installer is still required for all upgrade, downgrade, install and uninstall work.
The current routing has a technician on site three times a week to handle all DirecTV and analog cable work.
The traditional trap system is one where each subscriber has a series of traps on his or her individual drop in order to provide the proper services. At a 92 percent occupancy, 65 percent analog cable penetration, 20 percent premium penetration and a 23 percent basic-only penetration, this would equate to approximately 340 traps at about $9.50 each or $3,230 to build a traditional trap system.
The installer-friendly architecture uses high-level tap outputs going through a trap to feed a splitter, thus providing multiple ports at the desired trapping level.
When the installers need to install or change the service level, they just move the drop from one pre-tiered splitter to another. This architecture eliminates the need to carry an inventory of traps on the truck, speeds future auditing, and saves traps, or $1,919 on the initial build.
Lessons
There is really no reason to stay with off-air antennas for the local channels. Any money spent on optimizing the antennas is better spent on the construction of the DTV-based local channel lineup. Our subscribers immediately recognized the improvement to reception of the local channels and actually called in to comment.
Residents are more likely to subscribe to a service that they feel is of the highest quality, rather than subscribe because they feel forced to by the service provider of last resort.
Giving them multiple service offerings really pays off. Even though we have already doubled the number of subscribers on the property, we expect that we will continue to experience substantial subscriber growth over the next year as well; the bottom line is that increase in revenue of 350 percent.
What is the best way to deal with multiple security camera feeds? When the system only had a limited off-air-only channel lineup, we had lots of channels to spare.
This was not the case after we upgraded the headend to add 45 channels of programming, a channel guide system, and a community bulletin board channel. We still needed to preserve the property’s four security camera feeds. We condensed all four feeds onto the same channel by using a device common in the security industry called a sequencer, which sequentially switches between the four camera inputs to one output.
This video output is then given to a modulator in the headend so the residents can view the camera feeds as a CATV channel. This $100 sequencer saved the cost of three modulators, and helped us to keep our channel lineup the same as for our other properties.
Next
The next property that we are going to examine started out as a traditional SMATV with no ancillary services, and has undergone several platform upgrades.
We will start to address the issue of personal satellite dishes in the MDU environment, and take a look at the addition of high-speed data to the property. •
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