By Christopher Poli, P.E., Richard Moore, William Weeks, Motorola Connected Home Solutions
A Hybrid IP-QAM System Architecture is one of the most effective architectures available today in expanding plant capacity – allowing operators to offer an expanded and wide spectrum of high definition, international and niche programming. The architecture is capable of fully supporting Broadcast, Unicast or Narrowcast services (i.e., VOD) and Switched Digital Video; multiple video encoding formats (e.g., MPEG-2, MPEG-4) and can support a transition to an all IP STB solution. While a complete IP network build-out will likely take years and millions of investment dollars to complete; a hybrid system provides a bridging architecture without stranding existing set-top assets. This paper provides an overview of this architecture including a comparison of the bandwidth delivery provided in hybrid architectures to that of other architectures.