Cable connections offer broadband connections through the existing cable television lines. With special equipment, cable providers are able to send and receive analog signals using high bandwidth coaxil cable. The computer's digital signals are converted to analog signals by a cable modem, and broadcast through the cable lines to a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), which is connected to the Internet backbone. Unlike telephone line modems, cable modems are not limited to only audible analogue signals, but instead can use the entire frequency range for signals, resulting in a lot of extra bandwidth. The signal from the cable office is approximately 300 to 450MHz depending on the company. This signal is divided into 6MHz increments, each incncrement is a respective television channel. Cable modems use the unused signals for receiving and transmission of data.

Cable modems, like LAN connections and cable television, broadcast their signals and share bandwidth. Signals are not direct lines, like a telephone line, but a collective group. This means that all cable users share the same bandwidth. To prevent this from being a major problem, cable companies have grouped users to nodes, each node has their own dedicated CMTS and limited users. This prevents large fluctuations in bandwidth, but still doesn't solve the problem. Each user on the node still shares the same bandwidth, and the more users on the node, the less overall throughput each individual has. To prevent an individual user from using all of the bandwidth on a node, cable modems are transfer capped. This is a limit emposed which can vary from company to company. Most cable modems are capped at between 500kbps and 1000kbps download, and between 200kbps and 500kbps upload. Because bandwidth is still shared on a node, during peak hours cable bandwidth is significantly lower than the imposed cap. Cable modems are capable of ping times at least 10 times lower than dial-up modems, and equal or a little higher than DSL.

Unlike cable and DSL, satellite Internet service is available almost everywhere. It operates by having all downstream information sent to you by satellite through your satellite dish. All upstream information has to be sent by a standard dial-up connection, because the satellite receiver is a one way connection only. This puts some limits on the overall usefulness of satellite. It doesn't have the ability to be always connected, and it consumes a phone line when it is. It also has limited bandwidth. While the download speeds can range from 400kbps to 400Mbps, upload speeds are capped at 33k.

Satellite doesn't offer the low latency pings that other broadband connections have, and anything that needs uploading will take close to the same time as for a regular dial-up. The price is comparable to cable prices, and there are also deals if you use the satellite ISP as your television satellite vendor. The dish is slightly larger than the standard mini-dishes, and speeds will slow down whenever weather is stormy.

Inverse multiplex connections, other known as multilink, channel aggregation, channel bonding, shotgun, or load balancing, is a way to combine multiple slow connections into one faster one. Almost any connection can be inverse multiplexed, but only the slower connections really need it. Regular modems and ISDN connections are the usual favourites. Standard ISDN uses a double phone line to achieve 128k connections, and was built with bonding in mind. Standard modem connections later took IDSN's bonding technology and started to use it, because standard modems have a lot more to benefit from bonding. This is because multiple phone lines are cheap, and unlike ISDN, do not require the expensive offloading circuitry is installed. In some areas where cable availability has not yet reached, and ISDN and DSL connections are out of range, bonding modems is the only choice for a high speed connection.

One of the first bonding modems on the market was Transend's 67.2K modem. This bound two 33k connections. Later onto the market there were products that featured 2, or even 3 56k modems on one expansion card. This produced up to 112k and 168k connections respectively. Through software, up to 128 modem devices can be bonded together, but to find a computer that will support that many cards is another task. The most popular software is Diamond Multimedia's Shotgun software. This software will bind 2 modems, even of different speeds into one connection using 2 phone lines. Another feature of this technology is the ability to drop the second line when an incoming phone call is detected. The Windows operating system also supports binding up to two modem connections through software.

Although binding multiple connections can increase bandwidth, it is not without its downsizes. First, your ISP must also support this feature. Second, each modem requires its own phone line. And third, ping times are the same as they would be for a single modem.

Dial-Up Phonelines | ISDN and xDSL | Cable, Satellite, & Shotgun