A cable internet connection uses your existing cable television connection. When installing a cable modem a splitter must be used to divide the signal from the “old” installations and the new section. NO TV SETS CAN BE PLACED ON THIS “NEW” LINE.

The signal from the cable modem requires so much power that it may disturb the televisions. Sometimes the isolation of the modem can still draw an amount of power that a high-pass filter may be needed on the section of wires leading to the televisions. The high-pass filter allows only TV channel frequencies to pass and blocks upstream frequencies. Noise builds up on the ends of all wires causing interference with the modem which can be another reason for installing the high-pass filter.

Speeds
Cable modem speeds vary widely. Cable modem technology can theoretically support up to about 30 Mbps, most providers offer service with between 1 Mbps and 6 Mbps bandwidth for downloads, and bandwidth between 128 Kbps and 768 Kbps for uploads. In some cases, a very slow Wi-Fi connection between a computer and a wireless home network will not keep pace with the speed of the cable Internet connection. If you can hard wire your computer I would highly suggest it. Old computers, very old computers lacking sufficient processing power or memory cannot keep pace with a high-speed Internet connection.

Types of Connections

Ethernet
On most external modems the connection used is the Ethernet. This is sometimes referred to as a network cable, 10/100 cable, or cat 5 cable. With speeds not varying by the cable it offers unlimited throughput. (When changing from 10, 100 or gigabit hardware you may use the same cables)

USB (Universal Serial Bus)
Another type of connection is the USB connection. This type of connection is supposed to bring the installation down to a level that less advanced users can install. However;  this way has proven to not be a  reliable type of connection for us. The idea is that you do not need to open the box to install an Ethernet card, if the computer has an USB interface. If the computer does not have an USB interface, you will need to install that (and you are back to about the same hassle-level as with the Ethernet interface). Theoretically Ethernet hardware is 100 Mbps down and USB 2.0 is 480mbps down, again that’s theoretically. For me the Ethernet cable provides more stability, especially on operating systems older than Windows XP. USB networking imposes a heavier load on the system processor than Ethernet does, so there might be a performance impact in using USB for networking: this is unlikely to affect your network speeds, but might affect the percentage of processor time available to applications.

Cost
The installation cost is a significant issue, as this is something that needs to be done in the house of every subscriber. Another problem is the flexibility of the CATV cable (the cable line). It is not very flexible and harder to bend around tight areas.