Reply #1: Speed refers to bandwidth [View All]

[Terry in Austin]

Cable companies are selling information, in the form of bits encoded onto a radio-frequency electrical current. The electicity moves fast, yes, but the speed of the information depends on how fast the electric signal can be switched between "0" and "1."

A cable TV feed is around 5 megabits per second, so somewhere in that loop there is some equipment that's doing at least five million switching operations every second. For TV, there's not really any "fast" or "slow" option -- it's always "just fast enough" for a television signal.

Internet connections via cable are a different matter. The "pipe" that carries those five million bits per second is shared by a number of users, typically two to three hundred. Every user has their own individual information stream, so the bits that you're using can't be used by your neighbor. If you want a faster service, you have to have a bigger slice of the collective bitstream, so that's what you pay for.