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The authors have examined the basic characteristics of hybrid-fiber coax (HFC) return systems to evaluate their ability to support bidirectional communications. The ability to support bidirectional communications on cable plants will allow deployment of two-way video applications as well as telecommunications services over the HFC plant. The results of the studies indicate that ingress in the cable return path is primarily due to broadcast signals which accumulate due to the noise-funneling effect of the cable return. Although this ingress can manifest itself in strong narrowband interferers which will prevent the use of large bandwidth channels, a reduction of node size to nodes on the order of 500 homes or lower will reduce the amount of interference. Filtering, in which a portion of the spectrum is blocked from the subscriber residence may also result in a significant reduction of ingress. Other phenomena on the return path can be dealt with by means of sound communication system design, including forward error correction to deal with impulse noise, and adaptive equalizers to deal with reflections in high data rate designs. TDMA, FDMA, and CDMA can all be utilized on the cable return path, but the capacities which result when less than perfectly synchronized CDMA is utilized are substantially lower than for TDMA and FDMA. A single carrier TDMA approach will be highly susceptible to narrowband interferers, and is unlikely to be successful. For these reasons a TDMA/FDMA or pure FDMA approach with narrow channels is likely to be the most robust multiple access technique for the cable return path.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>