Franchisee shall operate, maintain, construct,
and extend the cable system so as to provide high-quality signals
and reliable delivery of one-way and two-way cable services for all
cable programming services throughout LFA. The cable system shall
meet or exceed any and all technical performance standards of the
FCC, the National Electrical Safety Code, the National Electric Code
and any other applicable federal laws and the laws of the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania, to the extent not in conflict with federal law and
regulations, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Franchisee's cable system, which utilizes portions
of the FTTP network, shall meet or exceed the following requirements:
A. The system shall be designed, constructed, and maintained
with an analog and digital passband of at least 860 MHz.
B. The system shall be designed, constructed, and maintained
as an active two-way system that allocates sufficient portion of said
bandwidth to deliver reliable two-way cable services.
Franchisee shall design its cable system so
that it may be interconnected with other cable systems in the franchise
area. Interconnection of systems may be made by direct cable connection,
microwave link, satellite, or other appropriate methods.
Franchisee shall comply with the emergency alert
system ("EAS") requirements of the FCC in order that emergency messages
may be distributed over the system.
At the national or regional level, two super
headends ("SHE") shall serve as the points of national content aggregation.
Initially all content will be encoded into MPEG2 streams and transported
optically to a video hub office ("VHO"). The VHO serves as the metro
or local point of aggregation and will be located within Philadelphia
and serving Southeastern Pennsylvania including Montgomery County.
It is here that off-air and PEG channels are combined with the broadcast
video coming from the SHE. Those optical signals aggregated at the
VHO are then transported to video serving offices ("VSO") for final
transport to the customer location. The VSO is a location within the
central office containing FTTP equipment. The key function of the
VSO is to combine broadcast cable television into the voice and high-speed
data FTTP network. At the customer location, the optical video signal
is demultiplexed and converted to an electrical signal, which meets
video industry standards for cable services. Standard home wiring
practices, using coax cables, as well as alternative media, shall
distribute the signal to cable ready TVs and/or set top boxes.