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the doterminal basic coax are headend, trunk distribution drop Cable Speed cable structure five cable cable, Modems Access major equipment connects to(or work????? of the parts ato feeder) home cable (consumer toand your acable system cable in-house electronics). in isthe system: modem, awiring, simple neighborhood, whichand one. in turn connects to an Ethern et card in your PC. The function of the cable modem is to connect broadband (i.e ., the cable television network) to Ethernet. Once the Ethernet card has been in stalled, It is a modem the TCP/IP in thesoftware true sense is of installed the word on-your it MOdulates PC. and DEModulates signa ls. Cable modems can be part modem, part tuner, part encryption/decryption devic e, part bridge, part router, part NIC card, part SNMP agent, and part ethernet h Typically, a cable modem sends and receives data in two slightly different fashi ub. ons. In the downstream direction, the digital data is modulated and then placed on a typical 6 MHz television carrier, somewhere between 42MHz and 750 MHz. Ther e are several modulation schemes, but the two most popular are QPSK (up to ~10 M bps) and QAM64 (up to ~36 Mbps). This signal can be placed in a 6MHz channel adj acent to TV signals on either side without disturbing the cable television video signals. The upstream channel is more tricky. Typically, in a two-way activated cable network, the upstream (also known as the reverse path) is transmitted bet ween 5 and 40 MHz. This tends to be a noisy environment, with lots of interferen ce from HAM radio, CB radios and impulse noise from home appliances. Additionall y, interference is easily introduced in the home, due to loose connectors, or po or cabling. Since cable networks are tree and branch networks, all this noise ge ts added together as the signals travel upstream, combining and increasing. Due to this problem, most manufacturers will be using QPSK or a similar modulation s cheme in the upstream direction, because QPSK is more robust scheme than higher order modulation techniques in a noisy environment. The drawback is that QPSK is Receiving Signals "slower" from than and various Transmitting QAM. sources (including broadcast transmissions, satellite-deliv ered programming, and local television studio productions) are received and proc essed at the headend. Television signals are electromagnetic impulses or waves t hat take up space in the "frequency spectrum". They require some medium through which to travel, or propagate. Broadcast television transmissions travel through the air at various frequencies, and television signals carried on a cable syste m travel through a special type of cable. Signals can travel through metal wires such as coaxial cable. Each television signal travels on a different frequency inside the cable, and so coaxial cable acts as a self-contained spectrum. In eff ect, the cable industry creates its own spectrum -- and thereby enables househol ds that cannot receive over-the-air transmissions to receive television. The cab le operator receives a variety of ifferent programs from satellite and broadcast signals, and re-transmits those signals through coaxial cable and/or optical fi ber to Architecture System Generally, customers' a largehomes. "trunk" cable carries the signals down through the center of town. The feeder cables, which are of smaller diameter, connect to the trunk cab le and branch off into local neighborhoods. When a customer purchases cable serv ices, the cable operator runs a smaller "drop" cable from the feeder cable direc tly into the customer's home, where it is attached to the television set. If the TV or VCR does not tune all the channels of interest because it is not "cable c ompatible," a converter is placed between the cable and the TV or VCR tuner. Thi s system design, or "architecture" is known as a "tree and branch" design. The t ree and branch architecture is the most efficient, economical method to transmit from -----------------------------------------------------------------------Any a1999 package comments High HighSpeedAccess.com Speed ofor multiple Access channels questions pleaseof email: programming webmaster@highspeedaccess.com from a headend to all customers.