Cable TV services vary among providers, but commonly a digital cable service is offered. This particular kind of service allows many different TV channels to occupy the normally pre-occupied frequency space by a single analog cable TV channel. Depending on the compression used, the number of channels that can be placed onto a single analog frequency varies. Most cable providers how ever manage to fit 10 digital SD channels or 2 HD channels onto a single analog channel frequency. Digital cable has allowed stations that are considered out of market television to be removed from the basic cable lineup from channels 2 through 13. These channels would have to be moved over to digital cable channels of 100 and above, in order to preserve bandwidth.

Coaxial cables allow the bi-directional carriage of signals and high-volume transmissions of data. The signals used in cable television are only capable of using a portion of the bandwidth that is available over coaxial lines. The remaining space leaves a lot of room for other digital services such as cable internet and cable telephone services, as well as wireless services. For instance, broadband internet utilizes coaxial cables through cable modems that convert the various network data into a transferrable signal to be sent over the coaxial cable. Certain cable systems use older amplifiers that are placed along the cable routes and are unidirectional – this proves to be problematic in the case of uploading data, as the customer would be forced to use an analog telephone modem to support the upstream connection. This greatly limited the upstream speed and made service far more limited , unlike with broadband internet. Most of the large cable systems are currently in the process of upgrading, or have already upgraded their equipment in order to accept bi-directional signals, allowing for much greater upload speeds and convenience.