said by gar187er:also your theory of 8 people running their modems to max out your pipe is quite false....seeing as your all assigned different time slots, this will never happen......if all it took were 8 modems downloading at the same time, nodes wouldnt have 500+ devices on them, they would only have 10.....
This is incorrect, there are only timslots on the upload, not on the download, the ATDMA timeslots are to avoid the CSMA/CD algorithm that plauges the ping on cable modems. Since there is only one node transmitting on the download and that is the CMTS there is no need for a multiplexing method. Simple memory buffers on the interface will do.