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?
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.