From an organizational perspective, it has become imperative to understand where each of the signals are and to have specific test points for each. If you had a video problem in the past, you would just disconnect the feed and check it out. Now if a video technician does that, depending on the location on the network, he may take down the cable modem and telephony service, again causing customer dissatisfaction. With such an increase in new service applications and the dynamic nature of take rates for all services, the need to quickly and effectively balance signal levels becomes even more imperative. This testing can be done without taking down any of the services, and allows technicians to monitor bit error rate information and other valuable data.
Return paths Return paths also place an additional requirement for test points.
Traditionally, the return paths were not used for much other than low data rates and narrow bandwidth services, such as status monitoring or set-top control. The return path generally didn t touch the customer. In today s and tomorrow s networking environment, thousands of subscribers are using cable modems that do not function without using the return path. When services are combined together and take rates grow, unacceptable ingress could affect a number of serving areas making it critical to be able to go into the headend or hub and monitor that signal, looking for noisy nodes and noisy serving areas. No one knows for sure where today s networks are heading.