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To: g_m10 who wrote (11822)	12/19/1997 1:27:00 PM
From: otter	Respond to of 97611

Boris, to some of your comments....... "cable not secure. It can easily be intercepted by anybody in your neibourghood" Cable is as secure as the traffic on a local area network and as secure as traffic on wide area networks, because cable uses the same transmission protocols as is used by the vast majority of networkers. For somebody to intercept your traffic, they would have to have access to the traffic directed to and from your "IP Address". I don't know how the average person would be able to do that. In fact, I don't know how the average bithead would be able to do that. Assuming that a risk does exist, then, you've just helped to establish the case for secure transactions and encrypting.... Which any browser and any web site worth their collective salts supports for those transactions that need to be secure. "it is only fast if you are the only person using it. When others in the heibourghood start using it they all have to share the same bandwidth and things are slowing to a crawl" The bandwidth provided that people share and the speed of the cable modem(s)being used have as much to do with the total bandwidth required and your resulting response time as the number of people using it and how often they press the enter key. Modems range in speed from .6mb to 20mb. If you have a 10mb pipeline, and if your modem is 10mb, you could send a million characters in under a second (I'm oversimplifying). Since the average transaction requires significantly less than a million characters, the amount of time the pipeline to your door spends sending data to you is very small indeed. Compare that to the think time you engage in before you press the send key, and then divide by two or even three and the result will be an indication of the number of people you can share the bandwidth with. If you are having a problem here, it most likely has to do with factors other than whether or not you are the only user. "Also, web sites and Internet don't have a capacity to handle highspeed traffic" Not so. Web sites and the communications infrastructure are perfectly capable of handling high speed traffic. The bottlenecks have more to do with the aggregate traffic on the backbones (which are, themselves high speed ATM and other sewer pipes) as well as the transaction arrival rate (the number of people hitting a web site at the same time). To the extent that a high speed local loop will allow a user to conduct more transactions in the same amount of time compared to a low speed loop, traffic will increase, but the primary determinant remains aggregate traffic over the backbone and to/from the web server. "And the last that comes to mind, but not least is our computers. They can't handle those speeds". Also untrue. If you use the LAN example, for the last - oh - 5 years or so, businesses have networked them, mostly on 10mb LANs - which not surprisingly, is the speed of a number of cable modems. They have been and remain perfectly capable of handling Internet traffic - very well, thank you. "After you download a graphic file it takes ages for the processor, graphics card and browser to handle it. Forget motion pictures. Computers that would be able to handle it are not on the market yet" This leads me to suspect that your computer has a system problem. If it is a Pentium - 100mhz or better (even a 75mhz system) with enough memory (16mb or more) running Win95 or WinNT, and a graphics card with reasonable memory on it (lets, see...... 2mb or more??), then you should be able to see the graphic quickly, run RealVideo, play AVI files after they have been downloaded and all that. What you've described sounds like the 16mhz 386 with 4mb memory I used to have a long time ago..... "From what I've seen cable modem didn't make any noticeable difference compared to my USR Sportster 33.6. I don't want to sound silly, there must be difference. Most probably it was less than 10% and I couldn't notice it." It really does sound like you have a 386. If that isn't true, then the problem may have to do with how your computer is set up - not only for local operation, but for access over the cable modem (You probably have a Network Interface Card (NIC) on the system that the cable modem guys were responsible for setting up. The next likely possible problem is that one or more of the NICs on the LAN (yes, the terminology fits) is faulty and is saturating the network with useless traffic. If THAT isn't true, there might be a problem with your cable company at the head end. The wrong thing to do, however, is to generalize based on your own experience. Cause it ain't so. The right thing to do, if you do have a pentium configured correctly is to bust the chops of the cable company.