It’s been a busy week.

A reporter asked us about the impact of “compression” on high-definition TV signals. (Verizon does not compress its HD signals, and delivers exactly what the content owners such as NBC, Lifetime and ESPN send to us via satellite.)  Comcast recently was exposed for compressing its HD as much as 38 percent, and explained that the compression they do to jam three channels of HD onto the space normally used by two channels is not visible to the viewer. 

But Ken Fowler, the technical expert who compared FiOS and Comcast in a test and blogged about it, says there are “real and tangible” differences in picture quality.

Another journalist asked us how much Internet bandwidth any given customer could ever want.  Comcast told the reporter it is silly for Verizon to have in place a system that can deliver 100 Mbps when nobody would ever need that -- except a few gamers or high-end users.  Comcast is making much of DOCSIS 3.0 and its 50 megabit per second service in one city, Minneapolis.  Either Comcast is simply short-sighted, or the company is justifying the fact that cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 service just isn’t up to the bandwidth task it will have to face in the months and years to come.

If DOCSIS 3.0 sends 150 Mbps of signal down the feeder to the hub, and if 300 customers link via coax to that hub, and if only half theoretically were online and busy at the same time, each would get 1 Mbps of bandwidth -- less than a DSL signal. By contrast, Verizon’s GPON technology feeds 2,400 Mbps to a maximum of 32 customers. Assuming all of them are online at the same time, making demands of the stream, 77 Mbps would be available to each. That’s a lot of difference and customers would notice.  Complicating it for cable is the fact that their TV and broadband signals share the same capacity. Verizon has separate streams for data and for video as this presentation shows.

Services like advanced high def, TV signals with four simultaneous HD views of the same sports event or 3-D TV and two-way 3-D video conferencing all promise to demand intensive bandwidth.  We haven’t even imagined some of the services yet to come.             

So in the ebb and flow of reporter contacts this week, these highlights popped out and I wanted to share them.