Cable accesstelevision is a general term covering a number of special services provided by cable television companies to communities in the United States. There are several other names for this, including local origination, community access and PEG access (short for educational, and government access). Cable companies are required to provide these services at a certain level, though the amount of locally_produced programming varies from area to area. The most well_known cable access service is public access where members of the public can create and broadcast their own (typically very low-budget) programming. Cable access and other terms are often used synonymously with public access television.
Local governments, educational institutions, and, to a certain extent, commercial entities have rights to the cable system along with the general public. Educational access is used for providing educational material while also allowing area schools to broadcast special events ranging from concerts to school board meetings. Government access is used to broadcast city council meetings and other municipal events and activities. Across the U.S., more than 20,000 hours of public, educational, and government access programming is produced each week.
Leased access is used largely for advertising. Time on those channels can often be purchased by businesses outside of the local area.
Different municipalities have varying contracts with the local cable companies. Depending on the size of the community being served and the contractual agreement between a municipality and the cable provider, these different access types may all be combined into a single channel, or they may be split across several. There have been some controversial moves made in certain areas across the country, where local programming is outsourced to an entity other than the cable provider. Often, this squeezes the amount of time available for public access programming.
Access systems began to proliferate and access programming is now being cablecast regularly in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Madison, Urbana, Austin, and perhaps as many as 1,200 other towns or regions.
The rationale for public access television was that, as mandated by the Federal Communications Act of 1934, the airwaves belong to the people, that in a democratic society it is useful to multiply public participation in political discussion, and that mainstream television severely limited the range of views and opinion.
Nonetheless, cable was expanding so rapidly and becoming such a high-growth competitive industry that by the 1980s city governments considering cable systems were besieged by companies making lucrative offers (20 to 80 channel cable systems) and were able to demand access channels and financial support for public access systems as part of their contract negotiations.
Cable modems are primarily used to deliver broadband Internet access, taking advantage of unused bandwidth on a cable television network.
The PSTN return path cable modem service was considered 'one way cable' and had many of the same drawbacks as satellite internet service, and as a result it quickly gave way to two way cable.
Cable modems that used the RF cable network for the return path were considered 'two way cable', and were better able to compete with DSL which was bidirectional.
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