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Cable modem at college?

Only if the cable company is in full control of the cable in the dorm.

Most likely you could not because your college probably owns the coax and is probably the provider for cable on those lines.

Basically you can tell by how your billed, if you pay your college for cable then no. If you set up cable on your own and get billed every month and the cable bill is in your name then yes.
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reply to Fox McCloud
They typically are owned by the cable company, but managed by the college, which normally prohibits the cable company from distributing or allowing cable modems. Simply to prevent any sort of liability (colleges need to track usage).

reply to Fox McCloud
Also, god knows how many splitters and such would be on the line.

If its like here the cable company I work for supplies everything, if work needs to be done on it we get access...I have yet to do any work in their rooms and its built just like the outside plant....direct lines to each unit from the plant, no splits!
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Truth has one destination, But many paths!

I used to be involved with supporting cable tv in dorms at a university. Each of the buildings was wired a little bit differently.

In the high rise dorms there was a riser cable with a tap on every floor, and then the rooms were daisy chained off the tap. They used taps rather than splitters behind the wall plate in each room. The last person in the chain would have the weakest signal, but it wasn't bad.

Some of the newer dorms (built in 99 and 03) had home run connections to each room. In one building built in 03 the contractor screwed up (and nobody thought to check this until the construction had been signed off on) there was a home run to each suite, but then there was a splitter in the suite for the 4-5 rooms.

Then the last choice was up and down risers in 4 story dorms that would serve rooms on each side of the wall. So you'd get 4 floors back to back with for a total of 8 rooms with one rise with a bunch of taps along the way (does that explanation make sense?). That building was the most difficult to troubleshoot because rooms next to each other wouldn't always have the same cable, and it was difficult to know where it was.

The actual cable service was provided via satellite by a company that exists just to provide cable tv access to universities and hospitals.

There are two other universities I am aware of that own their own cable plant (no idea of the wiring setup though) and contract to someone to provide cable TV at the head end.

All 3 of these were large state schools. I have a feeling having the local cable company provide service is probably more likely in smaller private schools.

Cable modems would not have worked in any of the 3 cable systems I was aware of. Two of them were satellite provided and the third purchased service from a local cable company, but had it customized to provide university channels, etc.

Also, in the case of all 3 of these campuses, using any kind of network connectivity not provided by the university was not allowed. Using any system to bridge connections between two networks was also definitely not allowed.

When those sorts of policies were written, the intent was not to limit dorm students (probably no one was even thinking about them), but to prevent professors from bringing in their own pipes into buildings, or from having professors or staff set up their own dialup gateways, etc.

All wiring is owned by the university, and must be installed by the university. It makes sense that if someone needs a larger pipe for research rather than bringing in their own net access, not securing it properly and bridging it to the university network for file access, and then letting hackers in, they can instead spend the money to do that correctly and bring in access through the university computing center. If you need 10 gig to a building and want to pay for it, they can make it happen.

reply to Fox McCloud
If, and this is a big if, there is a wire connection and not too much customization, you might be able to subscribe to a cable modem near the Uni, then try running the modem from your dorm/etc. Very long shot. But its a possibility.

I can't imagine how that would ever be possible. The facilities people would notice a cable running up the side of the building through your window.

What do you plan to do? run it on telephone poles? Not going to happen.

I mean plug a cable modem into the dorm room's coax port, but the cable modem is registered to a address/billed to a address near by but off the campus. Usually CMTSes dont care/cant care about the actual location of the cable modem on the network. So register a modem at a frat house off campus, then bring it to your dorm, plug in, and see if it works. Its a long shot but about the only thing you can try except for long range WIFI with a very high DB directional antenna.

Also you can use a VPN to get off the campus, or atleast campus IT cant say you P2Ped, only that you make 100s of gigs of encrypted VPN traffic.

That would only work if the cable system in the dorm building was directly connected to the same provider as the off campus residence. My experiences has shown usually this is not the case.

Really there are more important things for you to be doing that trying to subvert the university's net connection and getting your own. Downloading a bunch of illegal stuff is illegal, why waste your time.

You should put all that energy into studying and getting laid.

reply to Fox McCloud
Probably not. Here, we use filters to cut the upstream path so we disable the cable modem from sync. Only way to be sure without asking is trying it out. You don't even need to borrow a friend's modem, just connect any modem and see it it pass the downstream and upstream sync (don't bother about online status) and if both pass then you can run a cable modem form that line.

BTW, if they used taps on each floors in chain then everyone should have about the same signal because it start out with high values then drop down until end so if it was done right you would see no difference at all.

The key word is "done right"

In this particular instance the company wired the building for free in exchange for being allowed to provide service for 15 years. They did a really shitty job. At the time the university only regulated data and telecom cable, but not catv.

CATV has been rolled into the low voltage wiring standards so in the newer buildings it was done correctly. They are picky about everything from the brand of wall plate to the brand of ties, cable ladders, patch panels, bend radius, etc.