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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!vortex!lauren
From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: netnews costs
Message-ID: <468@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Dec-84 18:24:19 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.468
Posted: Fri Dec 14 18:24:19 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Dec-84 02:41:44 EST
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 52

By the way, if someone out there thinks that they can start
up a manufacturing line for cable demods and cabletext
decoders that can be professionally produced for less than the
approx. $500 end-user cost that is now being quoted by the manufacturer,
the project (and the satellite carrier) would love to hear the details.
The less expensive the equipment, the more likely the project is
to succeed.  

However, these do have to be professionally made, not thrown
together on open PC boards or something similar.  To meet
various standards, they would presumably have to be U.L.
approved where appropriate, and meet cable industry criteria for
filtering and interference rejection/production (or else cable 
companies will object to their being used with their systems).
The manufacturing will require the development of custom chips
for the cabletext data decoding/decryption, since off-the-shelf
chips for most of the work are not available for the proprietary
systems in use.  The demods must be fully cable-ready, and direct-tunable
to at least cable channel 54.  Appropriate AFT circuits must be present
to properly do the very delicate tuning for cabletext, which operates
on a different criteria than tuning for a "good" TV picture.

The manufacturing line should be capable of scaling up to 
thousands of decoders over a fairly short (though not immediate)
time period.  Hopefully the first units can be made available pretty
quickly, otherwise the project will be forced to proceed with
the existing units that are being manufactured now (by Zenith).

If someone out there HONESTLY thinks they can do such manufacturing
of the demod/decoder, and have professional and properly certifiable
units that will cost the end users less than about $500, please let me
know the details.  I don't need to know how cheaply a homebrew
decoder could be tossed together (though even that is not at all
simple to do with discrete parts) but how cheaply you can
start fullscale manufacturing for nationwide distribution.

Right now, plain old cable TV converter boxes (RF to RF, not even
video demod) cost between approx. $80-100 wholesale in most areas.
I personally thought that $130 for a full demod was a damn
good deal.  And as for the decoder cost -- it looked pretty good
cosidering what people are paying now and the limited (compared
with mass market items) demand.

But if someone out there has a way to manufacture all this stuff
for less (perhaps through use of slave labor or gangs of graduate
students?  Oops, same thing...)  please let me know.  Seriously,
the less expensive the equipment without sacrificing necessary
quality, the better off we all are.  I thought we were doing pretty
good compared with costs up to now.  If you can really do better, 
we're ready to listen.

--Lauren--