Cable Company Solutions

• HFC (Hybrid fiber coax)
  • Analog signal. Digital transmission is via QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation)
  • Backbone is digital network (SONET with ATM)
  • forward path: 50-750 MHz, reverse path: 5-30 MHz

• Cable Modem
  • capable of providing 10-100 Mbps, e.g. Motorola CyberSURFR - 10 Mbps per user downstream and 768 kbps return upstream

• "500-Channel" Scenario:
  • 70 analog 6-MHz channels (total of 450 MHz), and
  • 430-plus digital channels for compressed MPEG-2 movies

    (transmitted through 50 analog 6-MHz channels, each channel is capable of sending eight to ten 3.35 Mbps MPEG-2 movies via QAM.)