The Digital Beat Extra is a free online news service provided by the Benton Foundation. Much like our Digital Beat Daily , Digital Beat Extras are intended to keep you up to date on important industry developments, policy issues, and other pertinent communications-related news events.
Extras go beyond the headlines to get a deeper perspective of selected topics.
We welcome your suggestions to cover issues related to the following topics. Many would agree that the Internet's ability to turn every-day citizens into content producers and distributors is one of its greatest contributions. While cable modems can easily provide high-speed downloads of Web pages with streaming audio and video, they have more difficulty with data moving upstream, from a subscriber's computer through the cable systems and onto the Internet. When most cable systems were reengineered to provide Internet connections, they were designed with only minimal capacity to carry upstream traffic. So while cable modem subscribers can often enjoy mega-bit plus per second speeds for downloading, only a few hundred kilobits per second are available for upstream traffic.