ARRIS continues to make cable modems and cable modem termination system (CMTS) equipment compliant with the DOCSIS standard. Because of contractual agreements with Antec involving this joint venture, Nortel spun the LANCity group out into the ARRIS Interactive joint-venture. Nortel at the time had formed a joint-venture with Antec called ARRIS Interactive. Bay Networks was subsequently acquired by Nortel. LANcity, which was led by the Iranian-American engineer Rouzbeh Yassini, was then acquired by Bay Networks. LANcity was an early pioneer in cable modems, developing a proprietary system that was widely deployed in the U.S. Hybrid's system architecture is used for most cable modem systems today. Later systems used CATV for the upstream as well as the downstream path.

The earliest systems used the public switched telephone network (PSTN) for the return path since very few cable systems were bi-directional. The speeds and protocols used in each direction would be very different. Also key was that it saw that the upstream and downstream communications could be on the same or different communications media using different protocols working in each direction to establish a closed loop communications system. This allowed CATV operators to offer high speed data services immediately without first requiring an expensive system upgrade. a large downstream data pipe and many small upstream data pipes). A key Hybrid Networks insight was that in the nascent days of the Internet, data downloading constitutes the majority of the data traffic, and this can be served adequately with a highly asymmetrical data network (i.e. Hybrid Networks developed, demonstrated and patented the first high-speed, asymmetrical cable modem system in 1990. However, like 10BROAD36, 802.7-1989 saw little commercial success. The IEEE 802 Committee also specified a broadband CATV digital networking standard in 1989 with 802.7-1989. (In real-world systems, higher-order signal components become indistinguishable from background noise.) In the market 10BROAD36 equipment was not developed by many vendors nor deployed in many user networks as compared to equipment for IEEE 802.3/ Ethernet baseband standards such as 10BASE5 (1983), 10BASE2 (1985), 10BASE-T (1990), etc. The word broadband as used in the original IEEE 802.3 specifications implied operation in frequency-division multiplexed ( FDM) channel bands as opposed to digital baseband square-waveform modulations (also known as line coding), which begin near zero Hz and theoretically consume infinite frequency bandwidth. The IEEE 802 Committee defined 10BROAD36 in 802.3b-1985 as a 10 Mbit/s IEEE 802.3/ Ethernet broadband system to run up to 3,600 metres (11,800В ft) over CATV coax network cabling. The data rate of our test-bed system is 307.2 kbps. The remainder of the 294 MHz bandwidth can be used to carry other communication channels, such as off-the-air TV, FM, closed circuit TV, or a voice telephone system, or, other digital channels.

The BIUs contain Radio Frequency (RF) modems which modulate a carrier signal to transmit digital information using 1 MHz of the available bandwidth in the 24 MHz frequency range.

This architecture takes advantage of the well developed unidirectional CATV components. The inbound cable and outbound cable are connected at one end, the headend, and electrically terminated at their other ends. The cable bus consists of two parallel coaxial cables, one inbound and the other outbound. The system uses standard Community Antenna Television (CATV) coaxial cable and microprocessor based Bus Interface Units (BIUs) to connect subscriber computers and terminals to the cable. Walter Reed Army Hospital, and the NASA Johnson Space Center, but these are all standalone, local-only networks. Similar cable-bus systems are in operation at a number of government sites, e.g. The MITRE/Washington Cablenet system is based on a technology developed at MITRE/Bedford. Internet Experiment Note (IEN) 96 (1979) describes an early RF cable modem system.

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