Last week, Nagravision joined the list of digital terminal adapter (DTA) vendors that have received a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission for low-cost, limited-capability set-top boxes.
Evolution Broadband broke the ice with its three-year exemption from the FCC in July, and at the time the FCC said it would look favorably on similar waiver requests from other vendors. Since then, Motorola, Cisco, Pace and Thomson have also been granted waivers to deploy set-top boxes without the CableCards that are required by the FCC’s integration ban from July 2007.
Nagravision, which is a division of the Kudelski Group, applied for the waiver on its C-N060PD2A-SC and AC-N060PD2A-SIM model DTAs.
Cable operators are able to reclaim bandwidth for advanced services or more HD channels by using the DTAs. Comcast, in particular, has been a big proponent of them as it converts analog channels to digital in its Project Cavalry initiative.
