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?
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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.
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
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.
Where does this magic cable go?
into the urethra, probly
Wrong, it goes in the square hole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Non symmetrical, and my pc can only handle gig anyways -.- upload is always around 1/10 the download for the plans, but I tested 330 up the other day.
I would say cable TV coax has quite a lot more capacity than what the providers let on. In my city they offered up to 50mbps at over $100/month. Then they lost their lawsuit trying to prevent the city from installing its own fiber network and suddenly the cable company decided they could offer 150mbps for around $75/month (with no equipment changes). Once the fiber network started becoming operational (offering 1gbps bidirectional for$50/month) the cable company decided they’re better also offer gigabit connection speeds, but once again they simply flipped a switch to increase your bandwidth. This capability has been in place for quite some time, they just didn’t want to offer it and their illegal “monopoly” gave them no incentive to provide competitive speeds.
*I say “monopoly” even though we technically also have DSL available in town. However when I asked one of the techs why DSL couldn’t give me more than 896kps upload speed, I was told that the cable company had an arrangement with them which prevented the DSL from providing the speeds needed by businesses. After the lawsuit that broke up the state-wide bans on other providers, this practice was exposed and also broken up, so now the telco is able to max out their DSL speeds.
I have 1gig cable and it works fine. Theoretically can work up to 10 gig down and 1gig up with docsis3.1, which is part of why the US drags its feet on fiber rollout, but it’s far more sensitive to quality of cable
They don’t want to admit they’ve been screwing us over even though we all know it’s happening. All these companies could have rolled out suitable internet speeds a decade earlier but they would rather limit everyone to the lowest common denominator so they don’t have to admit just how terrible their equipment is in most locations.
I’ve gotta say, having city-owned fiber is great, folks here don’t have to wait weeks for Comcast to send out a tech who conveniently never shows up on the scheduled day, and customer service actually has a clue what they’re talking about. This is how a public service should operate.
Technology has continued to progress but I think many cable providers are capping at around 100 mbps. I could be wrong.
My cable internet provider offers up to 1000. I currently have 250. It is pretty unstable though that could just be the provider being shitty.
But I’m switching to fiber this month in my new apartment.
Impressive. I have been on fiber for a number of years now and when I switched the fastest pure cable (not fiber to the curb) I could find was 300 down and 10 up. Because of my work, upload speeds are as important as down, which is why I had to switch.
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
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.
The picture is a bit misleading to the rest of your post, because given the picture and the title, I was inclined to answer “Right there”! Lol
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.
Asklemmy’s purpose is a place to ask open-ended questions, “an actual topic of discussion”, as the sidebar puts it, its not really meant to just answer questions that could be researched and answered.
There weren’t any active communities I could find that my question would fit into, so I went with this one
You know of twinax so you already know the answer to most of these questions or at least how to find out.
Coax is used because it’s already widely deployed. It’s also significantly cheaper.
Yes with coax based technology you and all your neighbors are connected in a tree like topology. All your neighbors can indeed technically see your packets. Those packets however are encrypted, if memory serves DOCSIS uses AES.
Yes obviously you could technically double the speed with two cables. You’d also double the cost of cabling deployment. It’s a lot more cost efficient to make advences in the modulation. For example DOCSIS earlier DOCSIS revisions used 256-QAM, while DOCSIS 3.1 support 4096-QAM.
Coax physical infrastructure lasts decades, but we’re able to make new advancements with he modulation every few years.
This is specific to my old neighborhood:
It goes to a small hub, looked like a small green stantion/pillar, that connects the nearby houses. My old home’s was in my backyard, at one point I saw about 6 other runs for neighbors.
Then that hub, with bigger/more cables, connects to a larger hub. This was in the middle of my neighborhood by the school, and it was a quite large green box, probably 6ft tall.
From there I didn’t know where it went, but same concepts apply. That would go to an even larger hub, connecting multiple neighborhoods. Depending on your area and ISP, eventually they hit an end point your ISP manages which is probably a big building where they’re “connected to the rest of the internet.”
My question is: Where does this magic cable go?
Into the ISP’s modem on the side of your house. From there to a box along the street, and from there miles away to either another hop, or the datacenter in your local area.
Serial communication is typically much easier to manage than parallel. In parallel all existing tasks need to be completed before the next task can start.
Can their routers see the packets sent by my router, similar to ethernet?
The data is routed, and if you don’t need to send the data to you the router is not going to send it to you. The same thing applies to a switch on your local ethernet. But you only really see your traffic and any broadcasts. You don’t normally see Device A talking to Device B.
