ternet service to about half of these customers (Medin, 1999). More than one million of these subscribers have signed up for cable modem service. The future prospects of the cable modem are excellent. The current cable modem technology is stable and improvements are being developed at a rapid pace. Soon there will be internal cable modems on the market that will not need the Ethernet interface. There is tremendous upgrade capacity available to the MSOs and it appears that the MSOs are willing to make the capital investments required to make the upgrades. The MSOs have already moved the fiber-optic cable close to the end-users. It remains to be seen if the MSOs will move the fiber-optic cable all the way to the end-user. The coax portion of the HFC network that goes the final mile to the home is limiting factor to broad bandwidth. People are forecasting that the house of tomorrow will be totally networked. A great deal of bandwidth, more than there is available now, it going to be needed to accomplish this. Right now, there is speculation that as more and more people start using broadband access, there will come a point where there are so many high-speed users that the Internets backbone will be broken. But, this will not happen if backbone capacity is upgraded. If the Internet backbone is not upgraded, upgrading the cable data networks will be like building a new super fast off-ramp to the highway. Cable modem users will be able to get on the Internet highway much faster. But, they will find a traffic jam on the highway when they get there. Fortunately, the costs associated with upgrading the Internet backbone will be small in comparison to the cost of reworking other parts of the Internet to improve performance. Also, there is the issue of cable modems changing Internet usage patterns. As networks perform better, people are going to demand more and more out of them. To use the overused highway analogy, current Intern...
