Some home users may also find the cost to be prohibitive. Local cable companies also provide broadband access through their own lines. This system is as reliable as your current cable lines are. Cable companies say the advantage of their broadband service is higher connection speeds, increased availability compared to ADSL, and phone lines are not involved for access. The biggest disadvantage to cable access is that more people in your neighborhood that use the service, the slower the line speeds will be.
Cable companies use what they call nodes in each neighborhood to control the access to their system.
You may have noticed the new silver boxes hanging on some telephone poles in your neighborhood. These nodes serve from 500 to 20,000 and can get just as congested as I-15. Most MDU s will have to wait for boxes to be installed to the buildings before cable will be available and this process will begin in Salt Lake and spread North and South from there. Wireless was the most anticipated of all the broadband services because it requires no lines. The signals are broadcast from antennas and received by computers, much like cell phones.