Cable television

Cable television uses cables under the ground or strung along telephone and power poles to carry television signals to the homes of subscribers. It is also referred to as Cable, CATV (Community Antenna Television), CTV or PayTV.

The cables are normally either coaxial or fibre-optic cables.

The first cable system was built in the United States in 1948. Used to encourage the purchase of televisions in rural areas, the first cable network improved the reception of free-to-air television channels by connecting homes in mountainous areas with television antennas to areas with better reception, using long cables.

These systems were popular and cable networks began to grow in cities and urban areas through the 1960s.

Cables can transmit many different television channels at the same time. The number of channels that can be distributed through a cable is limited by the cable's bandwidth. If you think of a cable as a long water pipe, the bandwidth is how much water can fit into the pipe at any time.

Early systems allowed around 33 channels on a single cable. Today each cable can transmit 90 or more channels. Advances in technology such as fibre-optics have also greatly improved the quality of the broadcast and increased the number of channels available.

Australia's first commercial cable network was launched in 1995 and the TransACT network began rolling out in Canberra in 1998.

The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) reported in 2002 that about 33 per cent of Australian households have access to cable television, largely in major cities.

The Australian Competition Commission (ACCC) reported that at 31 December 2005, there were over 530,000 households using cable networks.