The last technical innovation from this crowd was figuring out how to scramble the Playboy Channel. The cable industry is exaggerating the speed. Yes, if a cable system has but a single user, it can theoretically deliver 10M bytes. Trouble is, entire neighborhoods will be sharing that same pipeline. Everytime someone else logs on, more of that precious bandwidth gets diverted away.
Cable is a one-way technology.
Without equipment upgrades, most cable systems can only send data downstream. To let you talk back, many early trials used telephone lines. Yeah, that's real slick. You've been drooling over the cable modem announcements. You've seen the big bucks going to cable modem-oriented companies.