Cable

You can now get Internet through your cable television provider with a cable modem. A plus for cable Internet is that unlike Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) it does not matter how far you are from the cable Internet provider’s central office you are located. With cable Internet you do not have to worry about the upstream side any longer because a cable modem will always provide the accurate signal strength for transmissions. If you are among the first subscribers to connect to the Internet using a particular cable channel then chances are you will have the entire bandwidth of the channel accessible for you to use. You will have to share the bandwidth with other users, including heavy access users; as a consequence your speed and performance may slow down, and in some cases your connection speed may be far below what the maximums are. In most cases though this problem can easily fixed by the cable Internet provider by adding new channels and then splitting their base of users among the new channels.

The reason a cable Internet provider can use the same cable for both Internet and cable television is because cable modems can put downstream data(or data that is sent from the Internet to a computer) into what is called a 6-MHz channel. So, really any solitary channel of programming on cable television is the same amount as any Internet downstream data. Upstream data (or data sent from a computer to the Internet) on the other hand takes up even less space of cable’s bandwidth, 2 MHz. This is really only because of the assumption that people will be downloading more than they will be uploading information. In order for cable Internet to work there are two keys pieces of equipment needed: a cable modem which the customer will have on their end and then a cable modem termination system (CMTS) which is located on the cable provider’s end.