Over the past two decades, cable television has largely supplanted over-the-air broadcast as a TV distribution medium, at least in most urban and suburban areas. Several years ago, enterprising companies concluded that they could leverage the extremely wide bandwidth of cable TV systems required to deliver broadcast-quality television as a high-speed conduit for broadband data communications. T...

Using cable modems that operate at several hundred times the speed of conventional telephone modems, many cable operators are beginning to offer World Wide Web access and other data services to residential subscribers. Initial experiences indicate that real-world Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks are susceptible to a variety of radio-frequency impairments that significantly reduce the benefit...