Electric cables are now extensively used for both residential and industrial applications. For more than twenty years, the Research and Development Division of “Electricité de France” (EDF) develops multi-scale approaches to study their fire behavior that presents a serious challenge. Cable are rather complicated material because they consist of an insulation and jacket of polymeric material, varying in chemical structure, thickness and additives, polymer material that may have char-forming tendency and burn when exposed to heat source. In this work, two test methods are used for the characterization of cable pyrolysis and flammability. The first one permits the investigation of cable pyrolysis. A description of the cable mass loss is obtained, coupling an Arrhenius expression with a 1D thermal model of cable heating. Numerical results are successfully compared with experimental data obtained for two types of cable commonly used in french Nuclear Power Plants. The second one is devoted to ignition investigation (spontaneous or piloted) of these cables. All these basic observation, measurement, and modeling effort, are of major interest for a more comprehensive fire resistance evaluation of electric cables.