Grass Valley Delivers Indian Advanced Cable Headends

As part of an initiative backed by the government of Tamil Nadu in India to achieve widespread access to good quality cable televisions, Grass Valley has installed three analogue and digital DVB-compliant cable headends. The installations are at Arasu Cable TV Corporation Limited (ACTCL), allowing them to provide services to local cable operators over a fibre network.
Each headend includes decoders for incoming channels and ViBE encoders to ensure the best possible quality on the delivery side. The network is driven using NetProcessor 9040 multiplexers, which also have the ability to transrate services where necessary. The order also includes Grass Valley routers, together with the necessary third party equipment to deliver complete and fully functional headends.
Mr Devidhar, IAS, Chairman and Managing Director of ACTCL, said: "The requirement from the Tamil Nadu state government was to provide analogue and digital television signals to the public in rural as well as urban areas, at a low cost, with good quality.
"Grass Valley was able to demonstrate their experience in projects like this, and we are very pleased with the quality and reliability we are achieving with the system."
Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley, said: "Grass Valley is both the manufacturer of the most effective and efficient headend equipment and a highly experienced systems integrator, which made us ideal for this project. With off-the-shelf products we were able to move very quickly to meet this need, and it is extremely satisfying to see this system up and running in India."
Working in partnership with local distributor and systems integrator MCBS, Grass Valley designed, built and implemented the systems with a very tight timescale: the first site was on air within two weeks of the order, with the other two sites following at intervals of one month. Each headend has built-in redundancy to meet the requirement of 99.99% system performance and service delivery.
Although conditional access is not yet implemented on the cable networks, the system is ready for it, with the ViBE and NetProcessor architecture capable of supporting multiple conditional access systems simultaneously.
(KMcA/BMcC)