Over the past five years, Cencom Cable Associates, Inc. , has acquired three different cable systems in st. Louis County, Missouri. These systems have about 3000 miles of plant and serve over 100,000 subscribers today with five headends and three AML microwave receive sites.
This paper will discuss the plan that has been proposed and is being implemented to interconnect the systems using fiber optics with control from one headend, eliminating the microwave systems and reducing all trunk runs to less than nine amplifiers in cascade. Also involved in this plan is the changeout of addressable converters in one of the systems without adding channel capacity, but using AM fiber nodes to break up the trunk runs. After the plan is completed, within three years, the system will be served from one headend with three hubs fed by FM fiber 1 inks and 9 0 AM fiber nodes.