Head End: How Cable Gets to Your House From Space

Dec 12 2011

Head End: How Cable Gets to Your House From Space

You could be forgiven for thinking that cable operators just buried wires under the dirt 30 years ago and have just been collecting checks ever since. Everyone’s entitled to be wrong sometimes, and it’s forgivable.

After working here for a little while, I discovered what an incredible feat of round-the-clock engineering it takes just to get cable, phone and broadband services to the house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with minimal interruption. The sheer cost and infrastructure it takes to make it so people all over America can sit at home with their pants off and tweet about popular television programs is mind-boggling.

I showed you all what a major outage looks like back in October.

That seemed to go over well. So I worked with a video team to pull together the following piece. In this video Larry Pestana, our VP of Engineering for New York City, shows us what it takes to actually get television signals to your house from space through our “head end.”

A “head end” is a plant that takes TV signals from satellites, processes them into cable quality and distributes them throughout a network and into homes.

Here’s a look at our head end at the 23rd Street facility in New York City – hope you enjoy it:

Categories: Broadband Penetration/Deployment, Content Delivery, Cool Stuff, Customer Care, Digital Cable, Fact-Checking, In the Community, New York City, What's New

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