Pat & all ASDL Lovers - FYI
SmartMoney: Keeping Track - Alphabet Soup: Making Sense Of The New High-Speed Internet Technologies, From ISDN To ADSL.
Dow Jones Newswires
This story appears in the September issue of SmartMoney magazine.
By David Stires
Looking for high-speed Internet access but not sure which technology to put your money on? If you live in one of the more than two dozen metropolitan areas now offering cable-modem service, and you're willing to pay a premium for the speedy connection, you might consider giving the nod to your cable company.
"We expect the cable modem to ultimately emerge as the dominant high-speed connection technology," says Emily Green, an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology market research company based in Cambridge, Mass. She predicts the number of households using cable modems -- which connect computers to the Internet over television cables -- will grow to 7 million in 2001 from 20,000 by the end of this year, far outpacing the rate of growth of competing technologies.
Cable modems are always "on," and therefore don't require you to dial in to get going. True, at $35 to $50 a month, the service is probably too pricey for the average computer user, but Green believes that no other technology in the next five years will offer consumers an equivalent value for impressive speeds of up to 10 megabits per second (mbps), hundreds of times faster than those offered by standard modems. And monthly charges are expected to fall as the technology spreads.
Competing technologies, meanwhile, are at this point less compelling. The telephone companies say that their Integrated Services Digital Network, or ISDN, has an advantage for tele com muters -- namely, the ability to let you talk on the phone, send e-mail and surf the Internet all at the same time over one phone line. But the maximum speed for the costly, hard-to-install service is 128 kilobits per second (kbps) -- four times faster than standard modems but still too slow to view bulky Web pages efficiently. It's a marginal benefit for a big expense.
The other nationally available high-speed connection technology, DirecPC, is sold by Hughes Electronics, owner of the DirecTV satellite system. DirecPC boasts that its 400 kbps link is "the highest-speed Internet access available nationwide." But it's still slower than a cable modem, and it's at least 21/2 times as expensive.
The one technology that rivals cable modems in speed is the asymmetric digital subscriber line, or ADSL, which some phone companies and Internet service providers are slowly starting to roll out now. But its availability is still limited, and it's not expected to become affordable for residential users for several years. And if you're thinking of signing up for ISDN with the intent of eventually migrating to ADSL, you may want to reconsider: While Bell Atlantic says it plans to make the transition "as smooth as possible," others, such as BellSouth, insist that ISDN will remain attractive to telecommuters, and therefore have not made any plans to compensate those who decide to upgrade to the faster technology.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Internet access providers are already offering the new 56 kbps technology, and the industry should decide on one of the two competing standards in the next few months. So if your cable operator does not yet offer modem service and you must have a faster Internet connection, buying a 56 kbps modem for $200 will get you a little more speed for a modest sum.DOW JONES NEWS 08-15-97
08:09 AM
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BellBoy |
