How the “Father of the Cable Modem” Nearly Lost Everything and What He Learned in the Flood

A Big Idea in a Small Town

When you think about world-changing technology, your mind probably goes to Silicon Valley garages or sleek research labs in places like Boston or Palo Alto. But one of the biggest leaps in broadband history actually came out of a modest office in Andover, Massachusetts.

Back in 1987, an Iranian-born engineer named Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard had a bold idea: what if the same coaxial cables that delivered TV into living rooms could also deliver high-speed, two-way internet? At the time, this sounded closer to science fiction than a serious business plan. Cable companies weren’t thinking about broadband. They were too busy trying to squeeze in more niche TV channels cooking shows, golf, home shopping anything to keep people glued to the screen.

Yet Yassini-Fard saw something else. If the right modem could be built, suddenly the internet wouldn’t just be a slow tool for academics. It could mean instant file downloads, telemedicine, even remote classes all things we take for granted now.

Betting the House on a Failing Company

By 1990, he was working at Applitek, a small networking firm on shaky ground. Venture capital backers had already written it off. Most engineers were spread thin, juggling projects that went nowhere. Still, the company had one promising technology: an early version of a cable modem.

So Yassini-Fard took a risk that, in hindsight, feels almost reckless. He bought the company outright. Not with a big check either he agreed to pay $40,000 installments every few months, stretching the deal out over four years. He renamed it LANcity, made himself CEO, and focused entirely on adapting the modem for ordinary homes.

Within just five years, LANcity had shrunk its machine from an 80-pound, $18,000 behemoth to a consumer-friendly $299 model. That kind of price drop wasn’t just engineering magic; it was the difference between an experiment and an industry. By 1996, Bay Networks swooped in and bought the company for $59 million.

But that story of success almost never happened. And the near-disaster that shaped it all unfolded, of all places, inside a flooded Army base on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Trouble at Rock Island Arsenal

One autumn day in 1990, the phone rang. On the other end was Bud Walters, a civilian managing the data network at Rock Island Arsenal, a massive Army logistics facility in Iowa. He wasn’t exactly calm.

“You get down here and fix this thing in six hours or I’ll have you arrested!” he shouted.

At first glance, it sounded like bluster. But in the military world, bluster carries teeth. And Walters had every reason to be furious. The arsenal’s network, powered by LANcity’s gear, had collapsed under floodwaters from the Mississippi.

To put this in perspective: Rock Island wasn’t just some office park. It was a 946-acre nerve center where the Army stored and managed weapons and ammunition. Losing data flow there wasn’t just inconvenient. It threatened national defense.

A Network Drowning in Water

Flooding had seeped into underground cables, corroding copper lines that were never properly sealed. Think of it like a home’s electrical system suddenly shorting out because water leaked into the basement only instead of one household, thousands of Army staff were cut off from critical communication.

Adding insult to injury, the arsenal had just installed around 1,400 Zenith PCs, creating a surge of demand for electronic messaging. Suddenly, instead of waiting in line at one of fourteen communal terminals, soldiers could send notes directly from their desks. That made the crash sting even more.

For Yassini-Fard, the timing couldn’t have been worse. LANcity was tiny, its future already fragile, and this customer was their crown jewel. Losing Rock Island might have killed the company outright.

The Emergency Response

Rather than argue, he acted. He grabbed five of his best engineers nearly a third of the entire company and jumped on a flight. Once on-site, the team began an exhausting detective job.

They couldn’t possibly crawl through every drain and tunnel to find the broken spots in miles of cable. Instead, they came up with a workaround: connect a modem to different points in the network and ping it with a test signal. If the signal made it through, that section was fine. If it didn’t, the fault had to be nearby.

It was slow, tedious, and physically grueling, but it worked. Over three weeks, they isolated the damaged stretches, cut them out, and spliced in new cable. Piece by piece, the arsenal came back online.

When it was over, the same man who had threatened to throw Yassini-Fard in jail was now thanking him. But the episode left a deeper lesson.

Preparing for the Next Flood

The real question wasn’t whether they could fix the system once. It was what would happen the next time the Mississippi swelled. Or the next storm knocked something loose.

Yassini-Fard realized that if broadband was ever going to scale beyond a handful of military sites or campuses, it needed to be more resilient. Networks couldn’t just wait for disasters to strike before reacting. They had to monitor themselves, detect early signs of failure, and reroute or repair in real time.

So back in Andover, his team began developing what became one of their most valuable innovations: a diagnostic management system built into the modem itself. Instead of waiting for engineers to fly across the country with toolkits, the modem could quietly monitor line quality, traffic patterns, and potential weak spots, then flag or even correct them before users noticed.

This wasn’t just a fix for Rock Island. It was a blueprint for the modern broadband infrastructure we all rely on today.

Looking Back

It’s easy, decades later, to think of the cable modem as inevitable. Of course we were going to have fast internet at home. Of course companies would figure out how to make it work. But in 1990, none of that was certain.

One freak flood could have sunk the whole idea before it left the harbor. What saved it wasn’t just clever engineering, but a willingness to scramble, improvise, and learn from messy reality.

In some ways, that’s the hidden story of technological revolutions. They don’t unfold smoothly in labs or boardrooms. They’re stress-tested in the wild in Army bases, in storm drains, sometimes even in disasters. And the people who manage to turn those crises into lessons are the ones who change how the rest of us live.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: Inc.