DVBC

DVBC, short for Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable, is a standard for transmitting digital television signals over coaxial cable networks. It is part of the DVB family of standards and was developed by the DVB Project and standardized by ETSI as DVB-C. The standard defines how to modulate, encode, and transport digital video, audio, and data streams over cable infrastructure.

In operation, DVBC uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to encode multiple digital carriers on a single coaxial cable. Channel bandwidths typically align with legacy cable allocations, commonly 6 or 8 MHz per carrier. The data stream is protected by forward error correction, generally a concatenation of Reed-Solomon outer code and a convolutional inner code, with the payload carried as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 transport streams. Multiple programs are multiplexed into a single channel or into several channels on a network, enabling broadcast TV alongside data services.

Modulation levels supported by DVBC range from 16-QAM up to 256-QAM, with higher orders offering more bandwidth at the cost of robustness. Modern deployments may upgrade to DVB-C2, a more efficient variant that improves spectral efficiency and error resilience.

DVBC is used by cable operators to deliver digital television, including standard-, high-definition, and on-demand content, while data services are commonly provided using DOCSIS overlays on the same physical network. It remains widely deployed in Europe and many other regions, complementing other DVB transmissions such as DVB-S and DVB-T.