High speed cable Internet access utilizes and shares the existing coaxial and fiber cable lines that currently bring television signals into your home. High speed cable Internet access is designed to transmit Internet information (packets) to your computer at phenomenally high rates of speed. In fact, customers receive speeds of up to 100 times faster than typical 28.8 baud dialup modems!

For "Two-Way" service, an Ethernet card is equipped to receive the bursts of high speed information from the cable line and translate the data in a way that your computer system understands it. With some Cable access providers, the Ethernet card and cable modem are provided with the service, while others require you to have your own equipment.

Additionally, it's important to realize that the television signals and the Internet information travel through the cable at different frequencies, enabling you to watch cable television while accessing the Internet at the same time with no impact on television reception.

A device used to provide fast Internet access over cable TV lines. The increased speed is made possible because cables (which transmit TV signals) have much greater than standard telephone lines.

Cable Modem Definition:
When it became available in late 1996, cable modem service had a few major problems. First, cable modems were substandard and incompatible; if you bought one from your cable company and then moved to another area, it probably wouldn't work. Second, a rush of new subscribers bogged down the system and made it much slower than advertised. These problems were mostly resolved when cable companies accepted the DOCSIS standard and began splitting neighborhoods into smaller, more manageable network segments.

Of course, developing any sort of cable modem service was a challenge. Old coaxial cables only supported 1-way TV transmissions, while Internet service absolutely requires a 2-way signal. Thus, before cable modem service could be offered in an area, the cable lines in the streets and on telephone poles had to be upgraded. The prohibitive cost of such an upgrade led many cable companies to offer "1-way" or "Telco-return" service, in which the cable modem was used for downloads and a standard telephone modem was used for uploads.