Imagine a world where broadband internet does not exist. In a world without this high-speed data transfer, could the internet continue to be the center of information, photos, movies, and corporate business opportunities as it is today?
High connection speeds brought with it the need for a cable modem, and it was Rouzbeh Yassini, an American electrical engineer who was born in Iran in 1958, who accomplished this in 1990.
Yassini was working for General Electric in 1981 and was manufacturing television receivers there. To understand how television signals flow, Yassini took home television systems and disassembled them to learn how they functioned. What he learned in the process came in handy at Proteon, a data network company in 1986 that used a cable they called a twisted-pair cable to carry data.
Rouzbeh Yassini, Ph.D., "Father of the Cable Modem", is an Iranian-American inventor, and engineer, who has gained an international reputation as a "broadband visionary" for his pioneering work in broadband industry and inventing the cable modem, establishing the cable modem industry standards (DOCSIS) through Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs), the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Although it was said that video and data could not be carried together, Yassini was confident that the cable, known as coaxial in English, could carry both television channels and other data. In 1990, he founded the company he named LANcity Corp. He and his thirteen experienced team began work on a device that could combine data and cable television networks. As a result of this work, the first cable modem was invented. The first cable modem sold for a whopping $10,000 and only took three months to install. Just five years from now, the company's third-generation LANcity modem was "plug and play" and was launched for just $500.
Shortly thereafter, the LANcity company was acquired by Mr Networks for $59 million. Yassini then started working on the development, implementation and certification of DOCSIS, the standard for data transport over cable modems.