The cable television industry has not yet acknowledged the practical impossibility of maintaining the 5 - 30 MHz cable spectrum free of non-Gaussian noise. Modem manufacturers and data network architects either are unaware of the ingressive beasts waiting to ambush innocent upstream data, or naively view them as curable afflictions caused by sloppy design, careless construction, and slothful maintenance. The cost of clean-up can be enormous and neverending. The time required to locate and repair causes of ingress is likely to be intolerable for services like traffic signal control that demand high reliability. Frequency agile modems, exotic modulation schemes, and sophisticated error detection and correction firmware are expensive, and inefficient. Perhaps the time is ripe for the fully switched, star network topology. Whatever the solution, some means must be devised for upstream transmission that is not so vulnerable to ingress interference.