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?
That answer depends on your ISP. It probably goes to a distribution box for your street, which connects up to a distribution box for your neighborhood, which connects up to your ISP, probably through many more distribution boxes.
At a certain point (probably the first or second distribution box), the signal goes from coax cable to fiber.
There are tons of different kinds of distribution boxes, routers, cables, technologies, etc for these networks, so what yours looks like is unknowable to any of us. Here are some examples of neighborhood or street level boxes:
Fiber:
DSL (landline phone lines) in a fiber junction box:
And then the higher level stuff would look something like this (I’ve never actually seen it, so this is just my guess of what it probably looks like, taken from a fiber supply company):
If you want to get a very basic understanding of some of the infrastructure between you and something on the internet, you can use
traceroute. When I just didtraceroute google.com, it took five hops just to leave my ISP, so that gives me a very basic understanding of how many levels my ISP has before my traffic gets out to the web.This is one of the most thoughtful and readable responses I’ve ever seen on any forum.
I agree! Great reply!
by the name I think I also sometimes see them in related topics on stack overflow and other sites
You are amazing. Such a great response!
A severe simplification of the history, but: In the 1960s, say, if you lived in a town with shit TV reception the local authorities might set up a really good TV antenna on a nearby hilltop and run a wire through town that everyone could connect their TVs to. This was called Community Antenna TV, or CATV, which later became known as Cable TV. The coaxial cable used for this doesn’t carry signalling like, say, twisted pair; instead, the purpose of coaxial is to provide an enclosed, shielded tunnel for radio signals to propagate along. The signal would fade over time, so repeaters would be added every so often to boost the signal and filter noise.
So, yes, all your neighbours can ‘see’ your data, because you’re all sharing the same coaxial cable, though it’s encrypted between your modem and the cable company’s local headend. Those boosters I mentioned would historically break the Cable network into neighbourhood-sized chunks preventing the modem signal propagating too far, so there would be a local headend within the same segment for your modem to connect to. The bandwidth available is split between all the users in the segment, so having a second coaxial cable coming through the wall would be of limited utility; it’d be easier for your ISP to just allocate more bandwidth to your existing modem.
You mentioned Ethernet, but in most Ethernet networks we use switches that ensure that only the recipient gets to see the packets. In the old days we used hubs, which are more analogous to neighbourhood cable networks in that regard.
I’m pretty sure no modern coax connection shares the cable between households. That’s a very archaic method.
If the cable coming through the wall is coaxial like the pictire OP posted, that’s exactly what’s happening. New installs will be FTTP and a lot of networks have been upgraded, but there’s still plenty of areas using DOCSIS over coax.
It seems you are correct. I had misunderstood how coax connections worked, I hadn’t expected them to be capable of carrying that much data over a single cable.
Where does this magic cable go?
into the urethra, probly
Wrong, it goes in the square hole.
anguished expressions
Where does this magic cable go?
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.
How long is the cable?
Normally you want to keep the cable as short as possible.
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable?
Technology has continued to progress but I think many cable providers are capping at around 100 mbps. I could be wrong.
Wouldn’t it be better if there were more pins, like in a twinax configuration?
Not necessarily.
There are also other houses in my neighborhood. Are their cables connected to mine?
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.
Can their routers see the packets sent by my router, similar to ethernet?
No. Every single home is on a different network.
How has your day been?
It’s almost 1:00pm and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to have breakfast yet.
It’s almost 1:00pm and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to have breakfast yet.
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.
Technology has continued to progress but I think many cable providers are capping at around 100 mbps. I could be wrong.
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.
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.
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?
Think of your modem like a radio, except instead of transmitting over the air it goes through a cable, so you don’t have to share the frequency bandwidth with others and can use it all on your own. The more frequency bandwidth the larger the usable bandwidth for data. Multiple cables can increase this even more, but then your provider has to support that and you can already get a lot over a single cable.
Multiplexing is a relevant term to look up for more information on the concept
The magic cable typically goes into ISP-owned hardware sitting in a box somewhere down the street. From there, it’s either converted into fiber optic signals or repeated until it reaches an ISP-owned building where the data can be exchanged with the wider internet.
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable?
It uses multiple channels (frequency ranges) in parallel, bonding (combining) them to increase throughput.
A surprising amount of bandwidth can be achieved this way. DOCSIS 4.0 can do 10 gigabits per second in download and 6 gigabits per second in upload.
I’m not a cable expert by any means and can’t answer all the questions, but I can tell you that the protocol used by cable is called DOSCIS. So it might guide you into some of those answers.
And the coax cable itself doesn’t go very far now because it’s connected to a fiber network somewhere in your neighbourhood.
I believe the coax “internet cable” is literally just the cable TV network and they use the leftover bandwidth to carry internet.
Yeah. And literally “leftover”. You share your bandwidth with everyone in your neighborhood. When you everything gets slow in the evenings and weekend, it’s because everyone else is online, too.
Always pick fiber if it’s available. Xfinity is shit. We’ve been stuck on them for the past 6 years because it was them or DSL, and DSL is only slightly worse.
