I don't remember cable modems becoming commonplace until maybe 4-5 years later. (though there was a fair bit of overlap, of course)
The year before, though, I worked in an office in Toronto with dual ISDN hookup, and it felt fast and state of the art but holy crap... looking back it certainly was not.
Because we dropped hourly billing for ISPs and didn't really have a tradition of time-billing for local POTS calls, dial-up Internet really wasn't very expensive at all by '97.
As a result, cable-modem services were probably quite a bit more expensive than dial-up when they were new for the majority of people.
This was the era when we were still trying to convince most adults that the Internet was actually something they needed access to, so justifying the kinds of pricing we have now would likely have been impossible for all but a handful of geeks in those days.
In Amsterdam it was UPC, though that might have been their name later on.
I recall when it was first being rolled out, it was some sort of weird hybrid service that did phone-up/cable-down. Not sure how long that nonsense lasted, because they weren't doing that anymore when my parents finally got it.
I still remember what a pain it was to get that 1-way modem working on linux. I had to print the documentation out from Windows, and then reboot. On the other hand, learning how to get that driver[1] to compile and loaded as a kernel module was very educational.
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/sb...