By David J. Large, Principal, Media Connections Group
Much attention has been focused recently on network reliability in both the telephone and cable television industries. CableLabs' Outage Reduction Task Force has formalized the modeling of distributions systems and suggested approximate component failure rates. Rogers Cable, in an extension of that work, analyzed several architectures and compared their performance. This paper extends that work by predicting actual and perceived service availability to individual users, including the effects of drop and terminal equipment. The availability of a reference architecture is calculated, along with attainable improvements. Using the modifications suggested, the user-perceived availability of a video service is calculated to be nearly 0.9999, including the effects of headend, distribution system, drop cable and converter.