ELi5: How do cable companies produce/provide internet service for customers?
In: Other
You’ve been into an office, possibly a computer room. Maybe you’ve seen a network switch. It’s the device that all the cables from the office’s computers attach. Each computer has its own address, like a street address. When one computer wants to talk to another, say to send a file, it packages up the info and puts the other computers address on the label. Sends it to the switch which reads the label and sends it on its way over to the correct computer.
The internet works the same way. All cables go to network switches which route the traffic so packages find their intended address. All traffic has that address label to tell switches where they want to go. And, yes it’s all wired.
Ah, wireless devices…. this is something like air mail, the plane takes off and lands somewhere. The package leaves your phone flys through the air and lands at the Access Point where it is routed to the next switch, over wires, which then directs it onto the next until the package reaches its address.
Enter the cable companies. They are paid to manage the cables and switches. They do not create, provide, or produce the internet. The internet is all the traffic, the packages.
Of course there is more equipment than switches and access points but then I’ll have to write that response in ELi10.
They’ll install a cable to your house and let you use it to plug your computer in. The other end is connected to a global network of other cables, all connected together and to other computers.
LOTS of wires all connected to computers, switches, cables that grew out of DARPA, universities and government research applications. ISP taps into the net and runs it to your house by wire or wireless signal.
Well no one “produces” internet for one. It’s a service, not a product.
Basically most of the internet traffic on the earth passes through undersea cables having huge bandwidth capacities. These are divided per country. The country government further divided the network spectrum and sell it to small companies. The small companies called ISPs then sell it to the end user.
The very start of this is the cable companies head end office, where they will have a backbone fibre optic connection to one of the big players in internet backbone, Layer3 et al.
They feed this access into a type of large server called a CMTS. From the CMTS, they go to from the headend to a ‘node’ which is a large metal box that feeds individual neighborhoods.
In some systems this node will be fibre optic in, fibre optic out, in older areas it this might be the first point in the system that is actually coaxial cable.
From the node, you can then either feed ‘trunk’ amplifiers, which serve as smaller connection points for individual streets, or directly to ‘taps’; Taps are were individual houses and appartments are connected to.
Then your cable modem will sends modulated RF signal (called DOCSIS) back allll the way to the head end, where the CMTS will translate to regular IP out to the wider internet.
Source; cable tech
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