CABLECASTING SETUP COSTS AND EQUIPMENT

Some of the setup costs and equipment of cablecasting are similar to those for rebroadcasting:

• engineering consultancy to help plan your cable network and where to locate a satellite dish to receive remote signals from satellite.

  Budget $1500-$10,000.

• one or more satellite dishes and receivers to receive the remote signals. They are usually mounted on the roof of the "cable head-end" facility. The head end can be as small as a closet, located in any community or municipal building. You need one dish and receiver per satellite; for example, some channels may be available on a satellite belonging to Bell, and others may be available from Shaw.

Budget $2-500


• cable converter boxes (one per channel) stored in the cable head end to convert the satellite signal into cable channels that TVs in your community can interpret. Budget $500 per remote channel that you want to bring to the community.
• cable from the head end to all the houses in the neighbourhood. This cable is usually laid in trenches in public rights of way alongside streets, like underground phone and hydro lines, so you'll need the co-operation of the municipality. (Municipality involvement helps if you're rebroadcasting too, but it's essential for cablecasting.)

  If the phone and hydro lines in your community run from pole to pole in the air, the situation is more complex, because you'll have to obtain permission from the phone or hydro supplier: whoever owns the poles.

  Estimates from other communities suggest that each additional meter of cable added to your network costs about $30, including the cable and labour. If you need about 50 meters of cable for each additional house on a standard city lot (the street-front distance in addition to the run into the house) it might cost about $1500, or just under three years of a commercial cable or satellite subscription.

  The more densely packed your neighbourhoods are (with duplexes or apartment buildings), the cheaper it is. You may also be able to get this figure down if you employ an engineer to oversee the process, but use volunteers (each householder) for some of the manual labour.

  Because of the work involved in laying cable, it's usually cheaper in rural areas to supply both television and Internet services over the air.

Go back to Setup Costs.