My house gets internet via a magical coax cable that is, I assume, connected to the rest of the world via my Internet Service Provider. This cable connects directly into my router, which links to all the devices in my home.
My question is: Where does this magic cable go?
Some followup questions: How long is the cable?
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable? Wouldn’t it be better if there were more pins, like in a twinax configuration?
There are also other houses in my neighborhood. Are their cables connected to mine? Can their routers see the packets sent by my router, similar to ethernet?
How has your day been?
The answer is either “it goes on the threaded port of your cable modem” or “it goes to a distribution panel somewhere outside”. It really depends what you meant by the question.
Normally you want to keep the cable as short as possible.
Technology has continued to progress but I think many cable providers are capping at around 100 mbps. I could be wrong.
Not necessarily.
It depends on the configuration your ISP used. Many would in fact share a pipe’s bandwidth amongst blocks of homes. I not sure how prevalent that practice is today.
No. Every single home is on a different network.
It’s almost 1:00pm and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to have breakfast yet.
I think most are offering as high as 1-2Gbps (asymmetrical) with cable. That’s what Comcast is offering in our area. With 100Mbps CenturyLink DSL being the only alternative.
But plenty of time to post on lemmy, keep up the good work!
I can shitpost on my phone while monitoring a code run and listening to a conference call. I don’t have serving staff and I don’t eat fast food (delivery), so breakfast requires my time and attention for preparation.
PS: Finally had breakfast at ~1:15. I should really meal prep but alas, ADHD.
PPS: I only post and comment on Lemmy when I’m busy working as a way to destress and keep focused. Otherwise my nervous energy starts to eat at me. If I’m here, I’m busy.
Why not eat before work
I work 80+ hours a week (this week I’m gonna clock 96+) and things don’t break on a schedule. I started at around 6:30am after going to bed at ~2:00. Normally I have a window around 10:00am, but no such luck today. I also ran out of protein bars.
Wow sounds like my life. What field are you in?
Information security and data management for the most part.
We get 3gb with our coax connection. Fibre optics claim used to be the ones only capable of gig plus, guess that wasn’t true.
Fiber can deliver a single 800gigabit connection over a single strand of fiber, and if you have multiple connections you want to run over a single fiber you can use different colors for each connection and run theoretically up to 2048 different connections over a single strand of fiber. (Currently most commercial deployments top out at about 160 connections per fiber strand)
Since these various connections are all made up of specific wavelengths of light, they can be “switched” by simply running the light through a prism, meaning a ton of your network infrastructure is entirely passive and doesn’t require any electricity to operate, reducing downtime, complexity and cost
One downside of fiber is you generally need one connection for uplink and one for downlink, but there are bidi transceivers which either use 2 wavelengths, one for uplink and one for down, or will time share uplink and downlink. Or since each of these individual strands of fiber are incredibly small, literally about 7 microns across, you can pack hundred or even thousands of strands of fiber into one cable.
Fiber also operates at literally the speed of light, meaning the connection to the Internet is incredibly low latency. Fiber also doesn’t rust like coax or telephone wires. As long as the actual fiber isn’t broken you can keep replacing the transceivers at each end indefinitely to upgrade the connection
I will agree though, it is super cool that multi-gig connections ultimately are possible over existing coax networks. I didn’t think I’d see it but here we are!
Edit: I was a little out of date. Currently up to 1.6Terrabit over fiber
It is true. What’s your upload speed? 😁
Fiber connections are synchronous. Meaning that the download speed is the same as the upload speed.
A gigabit fiber connection gives you 1 gigabit down and 1 gigabit up. A “gigabit” cable connection gives you 1.something gigabit down (it allows for spikes… Usually) and like 20-50 megabits upload.
Fiber ISPs may still limit your upload speeds but that’s not a limitation of the technology. It’s them oversubscribing their (back end) bandwidth.
Cable Internet really can’t give you gigabit uploads without dedicating half the available channels for that purpose and that would actually interfere with their ability to oversubscribe lines. It’s complicated… But just know that the DOCSIS standards are basically hacks (that will soon run into physical limitations that prevent them from providing more than 10gbs down) in comparison to fiber.
The DOCSIS 4.0 standard claims to be able to handle 10gbs down and 6gbs up realistically that’s never going to happen. Instead, cable companies will use it to give people 5gbs connections with 100 megabit uploads because they’re bastards.
Comcast has done some wizardry to finally allow decent upload speeds as of late. For years I’ve had 900Mbps down and 15Mbps up but with whatever upgrade they’ve done, I’m now at 900/200 which is decent enough. I honestly don’t even need all this download bandwidth and would be happy with 500/500 but most people aren’t running media servers and hundreds of torrents so they don’t dedicate much to upload bandwidth.
That’s a whole lot of words to try and justify not maintaining a 1:1 ratio on my server bro.
I currently get 2.3Gb/s down and 360Mb/s up on my DOCSIS connection. It’s advertised as 2000/300, but I’m consistently able to get above those speeds regardless of the day or time. It’s about $120/mo for those speeds.
Cable companies are absolutely still bastards though.