Rumour: Sky Optical fibre connection from LNB

tbag21

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Anybody heard anything about this. I heard it from a friend of mine who is a sky engineer (yeah i know everyone's got one!), apparently sky will be bringing out a new box which has an optical fibre connection from the lnb to the box, obviously a new lnb is required which is currently available/in development. This will allow 5 channels to be recorded at once and although he didn't say it im guessing they could get a direct 1080p feed down there also. Apparently it's cheaper to make the fibre cable than the standard copper fibre (which makes sense). I don't know how credible this is, just wondering if anyone has heard the same thing. I for one would be happy if i could record 2 channels and still be able to browse to another and view the programme info, but i guess everyone always want's more!
 
No. You need copper to supply power the the LNB anyway.
 
Invacom have a fibre-based LNB system about to ship.

It requires a copper cable - currently a standard F-type - to be fed to the LNB from a PSU (but not a receiver) to power the LNB. Then it has a single fibre cable which carries all four bands simultaneously - so it is effectively a single-cable Quattro.

The fibre can be split using adaptors (which can have multiple fibre outputs and be cascaded), and then the fibre is fed to converters that can emulate either Quattros, Quads, Twins etc. with multiple IF F-type outputs, connecting to a standard receiver.

It is being pitched as a solution to CATV satellite distribution, as the fibre signal loss is much less than that of coax, and the noise performance is better. You can therefore feed 10s or 100s of dwellings with 4 LNB feeds from a single, relatively small dish, with quite low cost cabling.

Whether receivers with fibre receivers on them - removing the need for external fibre-to-IF converters appear is less clear. If they could create a multi-switch with multiple fibre inputs from different LNBs pointed at different satellites (either on a toroidal or multiple dishes) then that could be a very neat replacement for a motorised dish as well. (At the moment you'd have to use multiple Quattro IF converters to feed a conventional IF multi-switch)
 
Will it be cost effective?

I know it has advantages but currently it costs around £170 for the LNB and another £200 or so for a virtual quad converter. For a home installation probably not.
 
I doubt it would happen but with 5 feeds is it could be used to increase the amount of boxes on the end by splitting the system for multiroom using GB ethernet to connect each box and creating a cluster. Recorded programs can then be watched from any box not just the one it was recorded to. then live streams sent to each box as required.

up to 5 boxes can watch 1 channel at a time and or record.
 
One day we may see the server/client system that was on the SKY roadmap for most of the early 21st century, that needs an easy and practical way to get access to multiple frequencies with a single dish and a single cable certainly does the business.

Given the price of SKY first gen hardware that I certainly think this LNB type would be viable and make multiroom easier to administer and more practical.
 

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