tional dial-up telephone modem connections. These voiceband connections are limited to 56 Kbps or less. Surfing the Net with a dial-up modem is usually a click-and-wait experience. There is a tremendous demand for faster Internet connections. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the way for cable TV (CATV) companies to become full-fledged telecommunications companies, offering two-way voice and data communications services, in addition to television programming (Clark, 1999). Cable companies that offer these extended services are known as Multiple Service Operators (MSO). The aspiring Multiple Service Operators realize there is a sizable market of Web surfers who feel a need for speed, and they want to be the ones to meet that need. Cable modems are devices that allow high-speed access to the Internet by way of a cable television network. Cable modems work much the same way as traditional dial-up telephone modems, but cable modems are much more powerful. Instead of using telephone lines as the connection medium to the Internet, cable modems use the cable that carries cable TV programming as its connection medium. Cable modems are designed to take advantage of the broadband capability provided by the cable TV infrastructure, enabling peak connection speeds many times faster than dial-up connections. More bandwidth equals more speed. A cable modem subscriber may experience access speeds from 500 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps or more, depending on the cable network architecture and traffic load (Halfhill, 1996). With their blazing speed, cable modems are able to rapidly download large audio and video files, providing true multimedia capability. In addition to speed, cable modems offer another key benefit: constant connectivity. Cable modems are online as soon as the computer is turned on. This is possible because cable modems use connectionless technology, much like an office LAN (Ostergard, 1998). There is no need to dial in to b...
