Or the hundreds of thousands of cable modems already on order by the cable companies could end up in the garbage because the communications tree of cable TV becomes root-bound. Like a salmon swimming upstream against the current of a river, the data being sent out of a cable modem-equipped computer has to swim against the wall of data running downstream, and that is only part of it. Cable operators are doing their part to make this a reality by rapidly upgrading their distribution infrastructure. To further increase the available bandwidth of their systems and reduce or eliminate the upstream bandwidth problem, they are creating a hybrid distribution system by combining new fiber-optic cabling with existing coaxial cable. This number is expected to rise to 50 percent in 1997 and to about 80 percent by somewhere around 2000, according to Merrill Lynch.
Cable systems equipped with cable modems for Internet access have advantages.
Because a large number of companies are or will be producing them, they should get even cheaper. The companies producing cable modems demonstrate the convergence of two industries, with companies from the computer side such as DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Motorola in the mix. Not to be outdone, though, the big cable-box manufacturer, General Instrument of Chicago, has its own cable modem, called the Surfboard. Still, there are challenges facing the cable operators, both technical and nontechnical. The intrinsically interactive nature of the World Wide Web, when combined with bandwidth hogs such as programming on demand, realtime full-motion video and data conferencing, and expansion of telecommuting, are a few of them.