A comparison of QAM and VSB for hybrid fiber/coax: digital transmission

There are two competing transmission systems for downstream digital transmission on hybrid fiber/coax cable networks: quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and vestigial sideband modulation (VSB). Both QAM and VSB are bandwidth efficient, and have the same bandwidth efficiency. Detailed calculations and simulations of QAM and VSB transmission on hybrid fiber/coax are reported here. It is shown that, since VSB has a higher symbol rate, it has at most 1/2 dB less received SNR than QAM at low frequencies because of dispersion and symbol timing jitter. This difference is negligible. Vendors proposing VSB recover the carrier with a pilot tone and a PLL, and vendors proposing QAM use all-digital data-directed carrier recovery. Simulations reported here show that QAM and VSB have very similar carrier recovery performance. It is concluded that for hybrid fiber/coax, VSB and QAM have practically the same overall performance, and the choice between these transmission systems should be based on considerations other than performance