But in some places, these high-speed services can be anything but speedy, as households hog bandwidth. These users aren't garden-variety heavy Web users, downloading mountains of data. They are typically customers who send torrents of data out over the Web, perhaps by streaming out video or by operating a home-based Internet site. Customer agreements for broadband services usually prohibit excessive use of this nature. Still, bandwidth hogs are rampant in the cable-modem world, and they are one reason cable companies are pouring more money into upgrading infrastructure.
Coaxial cables connect each node directly to homes.
Now most cable-system operators are busting down node sizes so that each one serves 500 homes or fewer. The perfect solution, of course, would be to run fiber lines directly into every home, but that's prohibitively expensive today. The cost of the nodes is nominal. In some cases, cable companies use the same node, but just add extra electronics and optics to each line. Collectively, America's cable providers say their systems comprise about one million miles of lines, passing about 99 million homes.