A way of sending several different signals through the same Analog media. Also known as BroadBand, although that term has (irritatingly, for some) become synonymous with high BandWidth regardless of delivery method.

Digital systems have traditionally used TimeDivisionMultiplexing; allocate each sender a fixed timeslot where it has exclusive use of the channel. This tends to be inefficient when senders have varying amounts of data to send.

These days almost everything is packetized. Data is broken into packets with a source and destination address, and placed into a queue for sending.