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Description

Affordable Subscriber Service Control

To remain competitive, cable operators need ways to increase subscriber revenues and minimize operational costs. With its field-proven addressable tap technology, Electroline offers cable operators control of subscriber services and cable theft, plus provides other unique features that are designed to minimize operational costs and improve the overall quality of service provided to all subscribers. The ULTIMA Series addressable tap gives cable operators this control at an affordable price while providing advanced features. As the name suggests, this is the "ultimate" addressable tap.

The ULTIMA addressable tap is built on a 9 inch platform and controls the signal being delivered to each subscriber port. It is controlled by the Electroline Control Unit IV, which interfaces with any cable billing system to automatically switch subscribers on or off whenever their status is changed in the billing system. Optionally, Electroline offers its SoftConnect software that provides standalone control of addressable taps.

The ULTIMA has, built into the housing, power and RF bypass that maintains signal continuity to downstream subscribers during servicing of the tap. It also can be configured for power passing capability and therefore is compatible with telephony deployments. Another exclusive feature of the Electroline ULTIMA tap is the ingress management module. This is based on Electroline's CLEARPath™ line of ingress management tools and provides the operator the unique ability to track down a source of ingress and localize it to a specific tap. Once the tap and the subscribers connected to it are identified as the source, and the ingress is degrading other subscribers' services, then the operator can decide to isolate the ingress source until service staff can be dispatched to make repairs. Overall system quality of service is thus improved.

In addition to the foregoing features, the ULTIMA tap is designed with interactive, multimedia, and cable modem services in mind. There are optional plug-in modules that provide the facilities for system designers to equalize the return system path loss. To optimize the operational performance of the return system amplifiers, optical nodes, cable modems, and CMTS, it is a benefit to have equal path loss between each cable modem and the first upstream amplifier and/or optical transmitter. In the real world, it is not practical to achieve "equal" return path loss but the ULTIMA tap's optional broadband equalizer provides system designers with the tools to optimize system performance.