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You are correct. I get an industry magazine, Advanced Imaging, which had a great article on cable modems. The bandwith must be shared by all the users on the system. However, the downstream speed is so great, even if you had 50 users download data at exactly the same time, it still easily surpasses the speed of a 28.8kbps modem. The signal will not affect cable TV viewing- there is plenty of bandwidth to support data transmission. According to AI, "Using conventional 64-level quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM), a 6MHz band could become a 30-Mbit pipeline." Also, due to the inherent noise in local cable lines, the need for a telephone connection is justified for the return signal. I think it's a matter of redundancy. It will take many years and lots of financial backing to upgrade the cable itself, and noise will always be a big problem to overcome. Just because they're being manufactured with the phone port, doesn't mean it must be used (forever). I'll re-read the article and post more when I get a chance. |
