Author: Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard & Stewart Schley
_Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard & Stewart Schley_
Reading time: 22 minutes
Synopsis
The Accidental Network (2025) tells the story of how LANcity created the cable modem. This invention changed home internet a lot. It made internet much faster, replacing slow dial-up connections with the speedy internet we have now. The book explains how changes in the industry and new technologies helped create this important new invention.
What’s in it for me? Learn how the cable modem changed the world.
The internet you are using now – for videos, calls, and quick downloads – uses fast broadband. It is much, much faster than the old, noisy dial-up internet. Back then, we waited minutes just to see one website.
How did we get this fast internet? Many things had to happen at the right time. Different people had brave ideas. But the cable modem was the most important invention. Without it, none of this would be possible.
This Blink tells the story of that invention. It didn’t start in the famous tech centers of Silicon Valley. It began in a small town in Massachusetts, where a company was trying hard to survive. This company had a big idea, even though others in the industry didn’t see what was coming.
Get ready to learn how the cable modem helped connect the whole world.
Blink 1 – Electronic beginnings
Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard grew up in a small town in Iran, east of Tehran. His family didn’t have much money, but he didn’t feel poor. By the time he was 14, he was already taking apart and fixing electronic things. This hobby would shape his whole life.
At 18, he made a big decision. He moved to America to join his older brother. His brother had moved there three years before with his American wife. This was not just a short trip. Rouzbeh was fully committed to building a new life in America.
At West Virginia University, his childhood interest in electronics became a real skill. After he finished his studies, General Electric gave him a job. The situation wasn’t perfect; the company had not hired enough different kinds of people. But Rouzbeh didn’t care about that. The chance to work was what mattered.
His low salary came with a great extra benefit. He could meet very famous people in the TV business. He learned everything he could about how TVs were made and how companies worked in this new and advanced area.
But in the mid-1980s, GE started to fall behind faster companies from Asia. GE’s reaction taught Rouzbeh a lesson, but not the one the company wanted to teach. GE fired experienced engineers. Instead, they hired new managers to try and make the company successful again. This plan failed very badly, and GE eventually sold that part of the business.
Many people would have seen this company failure as a bad thing. But Yassini-Fard watched closely. He remembered what not to do, which helped him later in life.
Blink 2 – The boom of cable
In the early 1980s, something new and exciting came to American homes. Suddenly, there was MTV with its many music videos, and Nickelodeon entertaining children all day. These new channels grew quickly. They all worked because of something most people didn’t think about: special cables.
Here’s why these cables were so new and important. Imagine a copper wire. Wrap it in metal, leaving a space between them. This space can carry many signals – much more information than old TV antennas could ever get. Cable television was here, and Americans loved it.
Cable grew very fast. In early 1980, 15 million homes had cable. Five years later, over 35 million homes had it – that’s one out of every three American homes. The cable companies were making a lot of money.
By 1984, Yassini-Fard was working on GE’s “Comband” project. The engineers there had a difficult problem. Cable systems were running out of space for channels. Each TV channel used 6 MHz of radio signal space. This rule was set by the Federal Communications Commission in 1952. Back then, no one thought there would be so many channels needing space.
The Comband team’s answer was Digital Signal Processing, or DSP. This meant changing old-style signals into digital ones. Digital signals could be made smaller and changed in ways that old signals could not. To do this, they needed to create a new, special computer chip that could handle this change.
While Yassini-Fard worked on these technical problems, a deeper idea began to grow in his mind. He felt there was something much bigger about this work than just putting more TV channels on cable. He couldn’t quite say what it was yet.
Blink 3 – The dream of connectivity
In 1987, his idea became very clear. Yassini-Fard saw something no one else did: a network across a whole city where everyone could connect and share information right away. Not just offices or universities, but all people. Technology would make the world feel like a small, connected town.
He had been collecting the ideas for this vision for years. At GE, he had learned all the details of cable television. These were the special cables going into millions of homes. Then, in late 1986, he joined Proteon. There, he found the second piece of his puzzle: Local Area Networks, or LANs. These systems sent information between office computers very fast, but only inside buildings.
Yassini-Fard wondered: What if you could combine the wide reach of cable TV with the speed of LANs?
He later started working at Applitek, a growing data company in Wakefield, Massachusetts. By then, his general idea had become a clear plan. He was going to build a “cable modem.” “Mo” meant sending data, and “dem” meant receiving data. This device would put data onto radio waves and then take it off again. It would use the cable wires that were already in neighborhoods. He shared his idea with his small, close team.
Three things were needed for it to work. First, a chip that could handle both sending data and working with digital signals. Second, a Media Access Control (MAC) protocol. These were like traffic rules to tell data how to move on the network without crashing. Third, the whole thing could not be too big, too noisy, or too expensive.
For now, though, he and his team used the equipment Applitek already had: the NI-10E. This machine was huge, weighing 80 pounds. It needed many loud fans to keep it cool. It didn’t look at all like something people would buy for their homes. But in theory, it could do the job.
Yassini-Fard called it his first cable modem. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. His dream was slowly becoming real.
Blink 4 – The birth of LANcity
By December 1988, Applitek was failing fast. Its yearly income had fallen from $12 million to less than $2 million. Most people would have left. But Yassini-Fard offered to buy the company.
The company board said yes in June 1990. Yassini-Fard changed the company name to LANcity. Suddenly, he was not just an engineer with an idea. He was a CEO with a company that was struggling and a product that barely worked.
Problems appeared quickly. Their biggest customer, Rock Island Arsenal, had a big issue. This US military base is on the Mississippi River. Flooding had damaged their cable network somewhere. But where? The system was huge, and they couldn’t find the exact spot of the problem.
After three weeks of very busy work, LANcity fixed it. More importantly, the company learned something key. Their modems needed special tools inside them to find and fix problems before they became disasters. Waiting to fix problems after they happened was not good enough.
Then came the technical difficulties. The company created QPSK, a special way to send signals. This method could work with the problems that often came up when setting things up in real life. Bad signal paths and signals escaping from poorly wired homes were common issues. These would stop the product from working if they were not fixed.
For their next modem, LANcity chose a design that mixed digital and old-style signals. The good thing about this? No more always having to adjust old-style circuit boards.
But there was another big problem. This new modem had to be small enough for a living room. And it had to be strong enough to work in a whole city network, with lots of data moving at once. The 80-pound NI-10E was clearly not going to work.
The team knew what they needed to build. They had the plan for the technology. There was just one issue: LANcity had no money.
Blink 5 – A new modem
LANcity worked very hard all the time just to pay for things. But in February 1992, they made a deal with Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC. DEC was a huge computer company in Maynard, Massachusetts.
DEC would pay LANcity seven times. The first payment was $626,000. Then there would be six more payments. Each payment depended on LANcity reaching tough technical goals. If they missed a goal, they lost the money. But if they reached all of them, LANcity could finally build its next modem and make fast cable internet real.
The most important technical part was a new set of rules called Unilink-II. This was the system to manage data flow for LANcity’s idea. It was smart enough to handle different users and programs in different ways. It would change based on how the network was working, how many people wanted to use it, and how much internet speed was needed. Streaming videos needed different handling than email. The rules had to know the difference.
Then came the problem of the computer chip. They needed new, special computer chips. This meant finding someone who could write computer code very well. Kurt Baty joined them. He was a confident programmer who wore cowboy boots. He charged $1,500 per day. This was a lot of money in the early 1990s.
But Baty was worth every penny. Most coders wrote about 300 lines of code a day, often with mistakes. Baty wrote 1,500 lines of perfect code in one day, with no errors. You didn’t bargain with people like that; you just paid them.
In December 1992, Federal Express delivered LANcity’s first special chips. The team waited nervously for the first simple test: Could these chips even handle electricity without burning out?
They could. Then came more tests, one after another. Every test passed.
The work was done. The new modem worked. Fast cable internet was no longer just an idea. It was real, with chips and circuits working with electricity, ready to connect the world. They could finally see the end of their hard work.
Blink 6 – Going digital
The Cable Act of 1992 hurt cable TV companies a lot. It brought new rules about prices to help customers. The issue was that cable companies had a lot of debt from growing very fast. Suddenly, they were trying hard to make up for lost money and keep their investors happy.
But new rules were not their only worry. A danger was coming from space. Really. DirecTV was sending up satellites. These satellites would send TV signals directly to people’s homes. This meant they would not need cable wires at all.
DirecTV made a smart move. They started using video compression with MPEG rules. These rules came from a group of movie experts. With compression, DirecTV could send many channels using the same amount of signal space that used to carry only one old-style channel. It saved a lot of space very well.
The cable industry had to do the same. They also started using digital compression. This helped them fit more channels into their systems. They also started sending signals both ways. They hoped to offer services where people could talk back, to keep customers interested.
Then something else very important appeared: fiber optics. This meant sending data using light instead of electricity. It mattered because light signals don’t get weaker like radio signals. Old cable systems needed many boosters to make weak signals stronger. Sometimes there were up to 50 boosters in a row. Each booster added noise to the signal and could be a point where things went wrong.
The cable industry decided to use fiber optics to send data to central points in neighborhoods. Then, the existing cable wires would take care of the last part to individual homes. This change meant they could remove many boosters in each neighborhood. This made the signal much clearer.
For LANcity, watching all these changes happen was huge. The cable industry was making its systems better in exactly the ways that would make fast cable internet possible. Everything was coming together.
Blink 7 – Feeding the masses
While cable companies dealt with new rules, something else was slowly happening. More people were getting home computers. In 1989, only 15 out of 100 American homes had one. By 1993, that number went up to 23 out of 100. More people wanted to connect to this new online world, but it was a bad experience. Computers cost a lot of money, and dial-up internet was very, very slow.
LANcity was showing that there was a better way. In 1994, Boston College did something amazing. They connected 6,500 student rooms to fast internet using LANcity’s cable modems. It was their biggest test so far, and it worked very well.
But the main goal was still ahead: a personal modem that everyday people could actually buy and use. The engineering problems were very hard. LANcity had to cut the price from $5,000 to $499. They also had to remove the cooling fan. This meant fixing the heating issue so the device wasn’t too loud in someone’s living room.
The solutions came together step by step. They made a new computer chip with 155,000 gates. This meant a lot of computing power in a small size. They also used a completely digital design, stopping the mixed approach of their earlier modem. And they had a very clever design idea: metal parts sticking out that cooled it down naturally, so no fan was needed.
At the same time, the industry started to see what was possible. Big cable companies like Viacom and TCI were putting modems in homes of special “friendly” people. These were mostly employees who wouldn’t complain if there were problems. Overseas, companies like Telewest in London and Amsterdam 2000 were already strongly supporting LANcity’s technology.
The technology worked. The systems were getting better. More people wanted the product. The fast internet change was no longer just “coming” – it was here, ready to start in a big way.
Blink 8 – LANcity’s legacy
By 1995, LANcity was doing very well. Its yearly income reached $6 million. Most of this came from selling their second modem, but their home modem was also becoming more popular. The dream was working.
Then, everything went wrong suddenly. DEC, LANcity’s important partner, who had invested $2.5 million, was losing a lot of money. DEC ended its partnership with LANcity.
But other companies in the business world were finally paying attention. US Robotics quickly offered $40 million to buy LANcity. Yassini-Fard said no. Then, Bay Networks, a tech company from Silicon Valley, offered $59 million.
Yassini-Fard paused. This was his company, his idea made real. But his team saw things differently. They had given up everything – many nights, weekends, and family time – working extremely hard for LANcity. Now they needed to think about house payments, money for their children’s education, and their future. They needed him to take the deal.
In September 1996, Yassini-Fard signed the agreement.
But Yassini-Fard’s story did not end there. Six months later, in March 1997, a world organization for communications, called the International Telecommunications Union, accepted DOCSIS. This was an official standard for how data rules should work. These rules used ideas from many existing systems, including LANcity’s Unilink-II. Unilink-II was the best in many different tests.
CableLabs, the group behind DOCSIS, asked Yassini-Fard to join as a senior advisor. He agreed, continuing to help shape the technology he had started. Now, in 2024, DOCSIS is at version 4.0. It supports internet speeds that are almost 10 billion bits per second.
LANcity the company may have been bought by other companies, but its main ideas are in every cable modem working in homes around the world. Its importance is not just alive – it is everywhere.
Final summary
The main idea from this Blink of The Accidental Network by Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard and Stewart Schley is that the cable modem was very important in starting the fast internet change.
Yassini-Fard and his company LANcity saw something others didn’t. They realized that the special cables used for TV could also carry fast internet data to many homes. With constant new ideas, his team changed a big, 80-pound test model into a home device that people could afford. They solved hard technical problems like cooling, clear signals, and managing internet speed. Even though they almost had no money and investors doubted them, they showed that fast cable internet could work for many people.
When the company was sold in 1996, its technology became the basis for DOCSIS rules. These rules now support internet connections everywhere in the world. What started as a struggling company’s bold idea became the hidden system behind today’s digital world.
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