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Technology Stocks : PairGain Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nazbuster who wrote (28092)	1/20/1999 5:03:00 PM
From: Graham Dellaire	Respond to of 36349

If you are the only one on your block using a cable modem you will get 10 mb/s when everything runs maximum speed (real world: more like 1-2 mb/s and most often about 128 K/s!). The reason you don't get full bandwidth (200 Mb/s they brag about) is that you connect to the cable modem through a base 10 ethernet card. As you add subscribers to a given cable line (say 10 of your neighbors along the same street). Your max transfer rates will be about 1 mb/s if you are all running application at the same time. In dense urban areas this will feel more like ISDN or even a 56 K modem! Fortunately, we are atleast 3 to 4 years away from wide spread cable modems (i.e. as wide spread as standard analogue modems now). xDSL will always run at roughly the same maximum speed regardless of how many people are using it in your area. But as you mentioned the farther away you get (especially with ADSL G.lite) you get poorer and poorer performance. Both are good solutions and you would have to decide based on a) how far away you are from the local exchange/router; b) how many cable modem users you have in your building/neighborhood (or if you have cable already or not (not good if you live in rural areas)); and PRICE, which ever option is the cheapest for a good base of 128k or faster transfer speeds will win in the end. LET THE PRICE WARS BEGIN! That is the biggest problem short term for xDSL, the price! Cheers, Graham