The magic of cable television

By Gatot Susetyo

JAKARTA (JP): Cable TV technology has become increasingly popular in multichannel television entertainment.

Cable TV is a distribution network (cable network) system of coaxial cables and optical fibers.

The cable network carries the programs from the central location (provider) to your home, giving us unsurpassed video and audio quality.

The signals are processed, aligned and sent through the fiber optic system at the speed of light via lasers.

They are received at one of seven distribution centers called a hub.

From the hub, the signals travel to neighborhood points called nodes where the signal is converted to electricity, which travels across a coaxial cable to your home.

This system enables international and local channels to be delivered directly.

So, we don't need any parabola and decoder here. The line is connected in the same way as your telephone and electricity supply is connected.

By this, we will also have direct access to digital downlink facilities which can receive and decode each of the channels.

The coaxial cable which connects your home to the network, will follow your electrical wiring. If your home electricity supply is fed from a pole, the cable will follow the same path.

If your home has underground wiring, the coaxial cable will need to be buried in a conduit at the side of your home.

We can also use this cable TV to do Internet surfing. This is what we call cable Internet. It is access to the Internet through the cable system supplied by the provider.

Hence, besides watching worldwide TV programs, you can also access the Internet. However, you need to have a computer with a 10BaseT network card and cable modem to access the Internet.

The cable modem is a special modem which connects your computer to your coaxial cable system.

Unfortunately, in Indonesia, the service is currently only available in select areas of Jakarta, such as Kelapa Gading, Permata Hijau and Pondok Indah.

In Indonesia, Kabelvision (a provider) provides about 50 channels with hundreds of movies every month.

We can watch this international channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Kabelvision also provides its clients with Internet access (cable Internet).

Kabelvision is currently jointly cooperating with six Internet Service Providers (ISPs), namely Link Net, Indosat Net, CBN, UniNet, Mweb,and Centrin, so that its subscribers can access the Internet through the Kabelvision network.