A service group may serve around 500 households. In other words, there is a pair of connectors for every service group. The RF/coax interfaces carry RF signals to and from coaxial 'trunks' connected to subscribers' cable modems, using one pair of connectors per trunk, one for downlink and the other for uplink. A CMTS has separate RF interfaces and connectors for downlink and uplink signals. One way to think of a CMTS is to imagine a router with Ethernet interfaces (connections) on one side and coaxial cable RF interfaces on the other side. A given headend may have between 1-12 CMTSs to service the cable modem population served by that headend or HFC hub. Different CMTSs are capable of serving different cable modem population sizes-ranging from 4,000 cable modems to 150,000 or more, depending in part on traffic. On the subscriber side of the headend, the CMTS enables communication with subscribers' cable modems. In order to provide high speed data services, a cable company will connect its headend to the Internet via very high capacity data links to a network service provider.

A CMTS provides many of the same functions provided by the DSLAM in a DSL system. A cable modem termination system ( CMTS, also called a CMTS Edge Router) is a piece of equipment, typically located in a cable company's headend or hubsite, which is used to provide high speed data services, such as cable Internet or Voice over Internet Protocol, to cable subscribers.

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