One of the main avenues for providing Internet service to the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market as well as to the plain old home market is through so called "cable providers". There is a well-established pattern for doing this which is often called hybrid fiber-coax (HFC). Another set of acronyms that relates to the same market as well as to larger markets is Fiber to the X (FTTX) where X might stand for H (home) P (premises), B (business), C (curb), H (home), H (home), or just about anything else. The latter set of terms is self-explanatory, and the former term arises from the fact that companies have already established substantial fiber networks (based on the right-of-way previously used for cable networks), and wish to retain the portion of their cable network that actually enters homes.

Part of the terminology that is often used is to describe a "truck roll", or especially perhaps to describe avoiding a "truck roll". This does not mean exactly what it sounds like, the installation of a fiber-to-cable "headend" is not what is being avoided, they are trying to avoid having to deal with individual customer premises installation since those are highly customized and time-consuming operations which rarely pay the company well to perform.

The term stands for Hybrid Fiber Cable, and usually relates to a setting in which right-of-way and so on has already been established for a cable television provider, which then replaces the "head-end" from the distribution center to the neighborhoods with fiber, terminated with "neighborhood multiplexers" which then become individual cable runs into the homes or other premisses. What ends up being provided is often described as "integrated broadband services", which may include video, and data, and voice. Currently both analog and digital signals are sent on the coaxial cable, which is multiplexed and modulated onto the fiber in a variety of ways.

The amplifiers in use typically have limited upstream capacity. Actually they have limited capacity in both directions, but the downstream traffic consists in large part of television channels which are broadcast, while the upstream traffic may be part of a voice conversation, or signals to the distribution center requesting some kind of individual service for a particular customer. Thus very ingenious modulation schemes are used, involving time-division-multiplexing (TDM) ahd frequency-division-multiplexing (FDM) so that the various cables can simultaneously (at least it appears to be) communicate a variety of signals.

There is a protocol called DOCSIS that is very often used between the headend and a modem on the premisses of each customer that handles much of this modulation and multiplexing.

One service commonly provided is VoIP which very possibly uses some of the same facilities such as SIP and RTP/RTCP that we have already discussed. The customer-end programming for this may well be provided in the "cable modem" which also handles the other facilities using DOCSIS.

Services such as Video on Demand and Digital Recording and so on may well be handled by a "set-top box", which is required for each individual television, and then programmed in many different ways and communicated through the cable modem.

Actual Internet connectivity is also provided, often through a customer provided NAT box which may also act as a router. Normally the cable company acts in this capacity only to provide connectivity to the Internet, and any services they may also provide are through a specially arranged separate agreement. As an ISP they must provide just plain old connectivity, usually of very high quality.

When you hear the term "Brave New World" this is one of the worlds that you should think of. Perhaps this refers to organizations that provide television services of various types: or perhaps it refers to more ordinary television that is broadcast over the Internet in a variety of ways.