Cable modem
A cable modem is a type of network interface that provides access to a data signal sent over the cable television infrastructure. Cable modems are primarily used to deliver broadband Internet access in the form of cable internet, taking advantage of the high bandwidth of a cable television network. They are commonly found in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, Costa Rica, and the United States. In the USA alone there were 22.5 million cable modem users during the first quarter of 2005, up from 17.4 million in the first quarter of 2004. In network topology, a cable modem is a network bridge that conforms to IEEE 802.1D for Ethernet networking (with some modifications). The cable modem bridges Ethernet frames between a customer LAN and the coax cable network. With respect to the OSI model, a cable modem is a data link layer (or layer 2) forwarder. A cable modem does support functionalities at other layers.
