The Cable Guy

Run the cable, splice the fiber, win every home. Build your own cable company in real American towns.

Every town needs a connection. You’re going to give it one.

The Cable Guy is a sim where you build a cable and fiber network. You start with an old pickup, a ladder and a loan. You finish with a headend, a fleet of trucks and a whole town watching TV and streaming on lines you built.

Build a real network
Bring the signal in at the headend and send it across town as light on fiber. Then light up nodes, place amplifiers and run coax down every street to every house. Your network follows real cable rules: if an amp cascade runs too long, the picture breaks up. You can read back everything you’ve built on a plant map drawn like a real cable company’s design print.

Send out your crews, or climb the poles yourself
Hire construction and splicing crews and send them out to work. Or take the job yourself: drive the truck, put up your ladder, climb the pole and do the work by hand. Inside the splice trailer, open a dome closure and splice the fiber strand by strand, tray by tray.

Win every home
Every household has an opinion and lets you know it: happy when they’re installed, angry when they’re still waiting, had an outage or think you’re too expensive. Set your prices, keep the picture on and grow your subscriber count. Your company levels up from 1 to 10 as it earns, and each level unlocks more. Along the way you can take on Tri-County Cable, the rival that already owns the town next door.

Real American towns
Every map is built from a real place: the high plains of Douglas, Wyoming; the canals and pool homes of Cape Coral, Florida; rural Edgar Springs, Missouri; coastal Ilwaco, Washington; and car-free Mackinac Island, Michigan. Mount Lemmon, Arizona is available as an add-on. Work goes on day and night, and each town keeps growing while you build.

Learn the trade from scratch
You don’t need to know anything about cable. Your first job is at Tri-County, where Jon Goodyear teaches you the trade in eight lessons. He explains what a headend is, why fiber carries light, and what a node does. Then you quit and start your own company. You can also jump straight into Greenfield, Beginner, Takeover, Storm Coast or Sandbox.

Run the business
Keep an eye on cash flow, loans, research and crews. Decide when to expand and where to build next, and keep the lights on when a storm comes through.