The network is highly scalable, enabling expansion of available bandwidth to meet increasing customer demands without major network upgrades. Cox customers connect to the Internet via a nationwide, very high-speed, private Tier 1 backbone. The private backbone ensures low network latency, and contributes to higher effective throughput. Tier 2 or below ISPs, some of whom provide DSL services, connect to the Internet via Tier 1 providers. This Tier 1 connection can reduce the speed and capacity of the Internet connection for the customer.
Cable networks are no less secure than phone networks.
Although cable modems share a common cable infrastructure that may serve many customers, each cable modem is addressed individually. Thanks to the 750Mhz capacity of Cox's network and plant, additional bandwidth is reserved for the next generation of services yet to be developed. Cable networks can do this because they can deliver much more bandwidth to their customers than can telephone lines. Telephone lines are limited to approximately 1Mhz of bandwidth, which must be shared between voice and data services. The ring architecture provides multiple paths to each of Cox's HFC nodes serving 1,000 or fewer customers.