By 2002, the survey says, there will be 11 million connected households, half of which will use cable modems despite increasing availability of other technologies. Cable modem proponents point to three factors that keep their numbers going up. The first is speed. Second, cable modems can remain online whenever the PC is on, similar to the LANs used in offices. The third factor is competition.
Cable modems offer an attractive alternative to using telephone lines to access the Internet.
Internet users have the option to shift their service away from the telephone companies' aging copper wire to the relatively newer and more robust cable network. Cable modems operate over the ordinary cable TV network cables. Older CATV systems initially used only coaxial cable. Current systems use fiber from the head end to a local optical node, reducing system noise, and coaxial cable from the node to the subscriber. While telephonic approaches dedicate bandwidth to each user, cable networks use a shared bandwidth approach.