By Farr Farhan, Lee Thompson, Scientific-Atlanta
There is a growing acceptance for Hybrid Fiber Coax architectures to serve the many requirements of a multi-media environment. Given this application of analog video and telecommunications services, there is a great desire to understand and predict the network availability for telephone-like services. This paper will address the various elements involved in the actual offering of telephone service and their resulting impact on the availability of the network services. Efforts will be made to characterize the individual contributions as well as methods to improve the overall availability by use of techniques such as electronic redundancy and/or diversity. Projections will be made on availability of POTS services in that environment, given the configuration of the optics, the number of amplifiers in cascade, powering alternatives and other contributing factors in the availability of the service.