On 11 October 1996 Paul Delany's home was connected to the Rogers Cablevision data service, known as "The Wave."
This service is now available in selected areas of Greater Vancouver, as well as in Toronto and other Canadian sites. It provides a Zenith 500K (upstream and downstream) cable modem, which currently connects to a local hub with 256 ports, about 150m from my home. From there it goes via fiber to a Rogers server in Vancouver.
The interface to The Wave is a Netscape home page:
The service is reasonably stable; download speeds run at about five to ten times as fast as my previous 14.4 modem. Cable data networks suffer from contention between users, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in Vancouver yet. However, half an hour after you get connected you realize that most of your waiting time is the fault of congestion out there on the Net - so that a fast link to the local server only solves a modest part of the problem. Still, this is the best service available, it connects you in seconds without any dialup, there's no per-minute charge, and I'd hate to lose it.
I've received good quality audio, and muddy streaming video over the Net.
For more information, e-mail me at delany@sfu.ca. Here are some other sites with good information on cable modems:
CATV Cyberlab