| 摘要 |
Only one or only a few channels are sent at a time from circuitry located in a curbside box (15), via link (22) such as either a coaxial or a fiber cable, into a customer's home TV set (14) or personal computer. However, many more than a few channels are delivered to the curbside box, via a line (46,47) such as a fiber or a coaxial cable, from a central office (36) or a central bank (37) of paid video-movies to be selected by the customers. Thus whereas the link from the central office or central bank is relatively broad-band (e.g., 500 MHz to 1,000 MHz), the cable from the curbside to the home (or any other kind of building) can be relatively narrow-band (e.g., 5 MHz to 50 MHz). The curbside box serves a multitude of homes -- a separate (narrow-band) cable running to each home from the (same) curbside switch. Each channel can be a free radio or free TV channel, a stored or an on-line newspaper pay channel, or a pay TV channel, or pay-per-view channel (i.e., the customer must give advance notice per view, and may begin viewing in the middle of a selected program, or may come in at the beginning of a selected program with a short delay, depending on the sender's arrangement) Requests from each TV set ineach home (e.g., initiated by means of a hand-held remote control infra-red sending device (11)) can be sent to the curbside box from the home along a link (23) such as a wire or along the same curbside-to-home cable itself. In addition, billing of customers can be accomplished by means of another link (50) connecting a junction in the wire or in the curbside-to-home cable to one or more remote billing centers (40). |
