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back to article German cable operators told to tighten up

A German court has ruled that any interference to cable TV services is the cable operator's problem, and can't be used to delay the Digital Dividend auctions in the country. The Cologne Administrative Court rejected an action brought by Kabel Baden-Wuerttemberg which sought to delay the auction. The cable operator claimed LTE …

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  1. The First Dave

    Responsibility

    Actually, I think you will find that there is _joint_ responsibility: electronic devices must not cause damaging interference, and must also accept interference without a major malfunction (I'm paraphrasing slightly), but neither of these have anything to do with the frequency in use, purely the quality of equipment.

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    1. Lennart Sorensen
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      Well it is entirely the cable companies responsibility.

      If LTE is licensed to use certain frequencies and the cable company isn't and the cable company happens to use some of those frequencies inside their cables. So this means it is the cable company's responsibility to not cause interference and their responsibility to deal with any interference.

      After all LTE operating at a licensed frequency is NOT interference. It is proper operation.

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  2. Christian Berger

    You don't know german cable companies

    German cable companies are evil. They usually don't take any responsibility. In most cases, if you have a technical problem, they either tell you to "go to your landlord" or they just stop talking to you.

    At least the largest one of them works on old equipment which is slowly crumbling appart. It's not unusual that whenever there is a light rain shower at the downlink station, the picture goes away, beeing replaced by a nice FUBK test-pattern labelled "Deutsche Bundespost". (that's the pre 1995 name of the cable operator back then) I've seen cases where there was constant FM-sparks in certain easy to recieve television stations for months, but they just didn't bother to fix their equipment.

    Now this is at least a small victory for the consumer. A court has decided that the cable operators need to maintain their networks.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Facinating

    When I rolled out my company's Munich office 4 years ago, I was informed that most DE companies used shielded Cat7 office ethernet cabling due to very severe RFI compliance requirements. Sorta surprised that the cable operators didn't deploy the same shielded stuff...

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    1. Christian Berger
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      Deutsche Bundespost

      Well we like our equipment to be as good as possible. And good shielded cables are a good idea in general. I don't think the RFI compliance requirements are stricter than anywhere else.

      Cable operators use 75 ohm coaxial cable. This is of course shielded as any such cable is. However cables are old and rot. Many installations have been made by incompetent people. This probably got a lot worse with privatisation of the company.

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  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
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    Electromagnetic Compatability

    We've heard of it.

    And?

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