QAM and Digital Cable in the US.

Anyone have Insight as a cable provider.
What is QAM. I get the impression that digital cable broadcasts in the
QAM format and that you need a QAM capable tuner. If the signal is
encrypted you won't get anything.

That is my guess from reading all the reviews.

What I realy want to know is that if I pay for digital service are all
the channels encrypted or just the pay per view or HBOs.

Has anyone hooked up a QAM capable tuner to their cable and received
signals.

Thanks.

"QAM" is used to refer to the ITU-T J.83 Annex B transmission standard for
cable TV networks, which is used in cable networks in the USA. (FWIW, most
countries around the world use Annex A or Annex C, which is also known as
"DVB-C").

If you have an ITU-T J.83 Annex B receiver card in your PC, you can receive
_all_ digital channels in your local cable network with it, as an MPEG-2
transport stream. Encryption is used "above" the transmission layer.
Without decryption, you can only view the services which aren't encrypted
(the local OTA HDTV channels should be fed unencrypted into the cable
networks).


A cable network is a point-to-multipoint network, so all subscribers in
your area get exactly the same signals. Which of the services that arrive
at your house you can decrypt depends solely on which keys you have
purchased. In fact, if someone in your area watches pay-per-view or
video-on-demand, that bitstream will arrive at your house as well - but you
won't get the key to decrypt it.


Many people have, and many are using QAM cards on a regular basis to watch
the unencrypted HDTV channels.

Regards,«
--
Robert Schlabbach
e-mail: robert_s@gmx.net
Berlin, Germany