According to leaders in the field of broadband access, the best place to start is to make an honest assessment of your system's capabilities and your goals. Our approach is to have a field engineering team work with the cable engineers doing measurement and testing on the plant and explain the type of tolerances that must be maintained and the effects that weather will have on the system. If you simply try to put cable modems on a normal system, it wouldn't work. Once you're ready to commit, the actual hardware impact on your plant should be minimal. Most vendors report that a few racks of headend equipment are all that's required.
Some vendors establish a connection to a regional monitoring system to keep tabs on performance.
With most vendors, the level of operational assistance and technical support is determined by the cable operator. Some need help with reverse plant issues, and others prefer us to take care of the entire cable modem operation. In most small and midsize systems, a turnkey operation is probably the best way to go. Only the larger systems will have the available capital and the expertise to handle a data service from scratch. A turnkey solution is a matter of convenience because installation is a lot smoother and you have a revenue stream right away.