Transmission

• Cable providers act as that "community antenna," that central source for receiving many different signals and passing them on to you. Some of this is essentially the same as before, with local TV stations beaming their signals over the air. The general public picks up the signals on antennas, and the cable company does the same at its local transmission center. National networks, however, beam their signals via satellite dishes and cable companies receive them at base stations.
  
  

Processing

• Inside the transmission center, all the signals are processed to be sent through the underground cables that lead to your television. In the early days of cable, these signals traveled as analog transmissions with less picture and sound quality. Today, however, cable comes as a high-quality digital signal. Some of these digital signals are in high definition (HDTV), while others may have interactive digital content encoded within them.
  
  

Delivery

• The signals are sent through a network of cables from the transmission site down into an intricate network of smaller lines, called trunks, that eventually provide a single line to each residence in the cable company's service area. Many cable services simply require you to plug a cable from an outlet to the TV to receive the signal, but depending on the kind of service you want (digital cable, on-demand programming, etc.) you may need a converter box.
  
  

Types

• Consumers receive their service through different kinds of wiring depending on the company they subscribe to. Cable companies often use coaxial cables, which have been around for decades, to plug into the subscriber's television or decoder box. But more TV providers, including phone companies like AT&T and Verizon, use their fiber optic networks to send digital signals to a converter box instead of coaxial cables.
  
  

Pros/Cons

• Today's cable TV systems offer much more than the old CATV from decades ago. NCTA says that as of 2006 there were 565 national cable programming networks, giving plenty of options for subscribers to choose from. That's thanks to the digital signals, which can contain more content than the old analog signals. However, digital signals suffer from a "cliff effect," an all-or-nothing signal quality that can cause a bad digital signal to drop out suddenly rather than just appear fuzzy. The cliff effect mostly affects satellite TV subscribers during bad weather, but some older cable systems may still encounter this occasionally. Fiber optic cable is very resilient to interference, but signal issues can still occur if the transmission network gets overwhelmed by too much activity.