# Can you have a wireless cable TV system in your home

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-have-a-wireless-cable-tv-system-in-your-home/253722>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 6, 2004, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-have-a-wireless-cable-tv-system-in-your-home/253722 "2004-07-06T01:24:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2004, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-have-a-wireless-cable-tv-system-in-your-home/253722/1 "2004-07-06T01:24:20Z")

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I have Cable TV in my 2 bedroom apartment. Three rooms want cable TV so i have wires running along the floor. Are there wireless cable TV routers, boxes, etc i can buy? I know there are wireless broadband routers, but i have never heard of a wireless cable TV router. is there too much info carried in cable TV to send it wirelessly? I thought modern routers could carry around 100 Mbps, or something along those lines.

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**Author:** ![FatBaldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecd19e/32.png) [@FatBaldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FatBaldGuy)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2004, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-have-a-wireless-cable-tv-system-in-your-home/253722/2 "2004-07-06T02:52:03Z")

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I have seen ads (but unfortunately can’t google any right now) for 2 different types of devices. One is a transmitter that connects to an existing cable box and broadcasts to one or more receivers in the house, as you are suggesting. I also seem to remember a device that uses the house wiring to broadcast from the transmitter to the receivers. In both cases, though, all of the receiving sets have to watch the same channel that the transmitter is tuned to.

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**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2004, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-have-a-wireless-cable-tv-system-in-your-home/253722/3 "2004-07-06T05:42:27Z")

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> [@Wesley Clark](#):
>
> I know there are wireless broadband routers, but i have never heard of a wireless cable TV router. is there too much info carried in cable TV to send it wirelessly?

Yes, it’s infeasible to transmit the entire cable signal wirelessly. That wire is carrying hundreds of channels, plus (probably) internet and radio signals.

> [@](#):
>
> I thought modern routers could carry around 100 Mbps, or something along those lines.

Wireless-G is 54 Mbps (or 108 Mbps in some cases), so if you were to encode the video streams digitally (at 1 Mbps, about VCD quality) and send them over a wireless network, you probably couldn’t fit every channel in the available bandwidth… and the analog video that a simple transmitter would use would take up even more bandwidth per channel (though that would be measured in MHz, not Mbps).