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By Jonathan Tombes, Senior Editor

Blonder Tongue hit the 1,500-unit mark for its QQQT (Quad QPSK/QAM) digital transcoder in July. By early November, the company had shipped 4,000 units.

"We've been banging them out," Cliff Fox, Blonder Tongue product manager, says. Driving production is demand among smaller cable systems for a digital solution that the transcoder enables.

"Our unit is the headend piece," Fox says. "It takes the existing QPSK satellite signal and transcodes it to a QAM signal, and then you combine that QAM signal into your regular headend distribution system."

The DigiCipher II system-compatible gear works with existing programming from such sources as AT&T's HITS, video programming wholesaler WSNet and the Canadian provider Cancom.

On the subscriber side is the Motorola DSR-470 integrated receiver/decoder. In October, Blonder Tongue announced a re-sell agreement with Motorola. The DSR-470 contains a unified program guide, a dial-back modem, and both an analog and QAM cable tuner. "It's sort of a satellite receiver in disguise," Robert Shuff, Motorola senior product manager, says.

The first DSR-470/QQQT deployments were with Millennium Digital Media, in Belleview, Wa., Shuff says. The solution will impact students at MIT, Cornell University and Philly's University of the Arts through an arrangement with the Madision, N.Y.-based Falls Earth Station.

 Back to December 2001 Issue

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