Patent ID: 7002898

Claim:
A system for the asymmetrical transport of data over a network, the system comprising: a data head end that is communicatively coupled to the network and to at least one data source; at least one service unit coupled to the network; an encoder that couples the data head end to the network, wherein the encoder modulates data from the at least one data source using a first modulation technique and transmits downstream the modulated data over the network in a first frequency band to selected service units, wherein the encoder is a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) encoder; and each service unit including a decoder for demodulating data from the downstream transmission and a modulator that modulates data using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for transmission upstream to the data head end over the same network in a second frequency band, such that the data rate of the downstream transmission is different from the data rate of the upstream transmission.