How Does Cable Internet Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to talk to you about how cable Internet works. Cable Internet is basically a very high speed Internet connection that is ran to your house using the exact same technology and connections basically that are used now by cable television. That's why cable Internet has become so ubiquitous is that a lot of people already had cable television run to their house so adding the capability of sending Internet signals back and forth over these same lines was a great idea. So I'm going to go to my computer here and I'm going to show you some images. This is what you would see if you had a cable Internet connection. This is what is called a cable modem. It's basically a device and this is what does all the magic of connecting you to your cable provider. It's a device that takes an input that is a coaxial cable, basically the same thing that you would plug into your TV or your cable television box, it's just a same type of coaxial cable that plugs into this and what that spits out is a 10 based T Internet or actually 10 or 100, they even go up to gigabit now, Internet connection which is a Ethernet cable or a USB cable. Now you can plug a USB into this if you just want to connect with a single home computer. Obviously you'd have to have your computer near the cable modem in order to connect that USB cable, about 6 feet long usually. Or if you have an Ethernet connection which I would suggest, you can plug that into what's called a router. I have here an image of a router. A router is a device, this is a wireless one as you can tell by the antennas, this puts out a wireless signal. Those Ethernet cables plug into the back of the router here where it says connection to modem or WAN for Wide Area Network and it splits that Internet connection out to multiple computers and it also splits it in this case to these antenna where you can connect wireless laptops and other wireless devices. Now it takes that cable Internet coming into your house from coax, goes into the cable modem right here which converts it into an Internet signal back and forth to the cable provider and then either plugs directly into your computer by USB or into a router which splits it up into multiple computer connections that plug into your computer. That is how a cable Internet works. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just talked to you a little bit about how cable Internet works."