The Broadband Boss: Henry Samueli's Single-Chip Digital Modems Fueled the Broadband Boom

Those who did post in online forums or email friends from home typically accessed the Internet via telephone line, their messages traveling at a top speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. Meanwhile, cable TV was rocketing in popularity. By then, 60 percent of U.S. households subscribed to a cable service; cable rollouts in the rest of the world were also picking up speed. ¶ Hypothetically, using that growing cable network instead of phone lines for Internet access would dramatically boost the speed of communications. And making cable TV itself digital instead of analog would allow cable providers to carry many more channels. The theory of how to do that—using analog-to-digital converters and digital signal processing to translate the analog waveforms that travel on coaxial cable into digital form—was well established. But the cable modems required to implement such a digital broadband network were not on the mass market.