What kind of modem are you using?

[Tom]

I have had a MotorolaCyberSURFR cable modem
since June98 (It was a fairly new thing in my
area when I got it).
However, it's more than a year later and
of all the net cruisers I know personaly,
only 2 others have cable modems. Is this
not available, too expensive, not practical,
just a luxury...???

Just curious!

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MatroxG400MAX, AsusP2B-L(rev.1010), Celeron266(SL2QG@400MHz), 128MB PC100 SDRAM, QuantumFireball(ST)6.4, ADI MicroScanG66(19"), MonsterSoundMX200, PioneerDVD103-S(6x,32x), MotorolaCyberSURFR(cable), Windows98(4.10.1998+SP1)

[Buuri]

Well, that depends on the country. As in Finland, the Net connections tend to be a little expensive or then they are slow.
It's easy to understand why, when you think how the traffic is actually targeted. For a Finnish ISP, the cross-Atlantic cable will cost more than the whole Europe's connections. Much more.
Why? Where are the services located - where will people surf to?

In US, they can pay you for surfing but companies doing that don't rent good cables off North America.

A Finnish telephone company is rumored to rent 256kbps ADSL for about USD79 per month later this year. You can rent cable modems that use TV cable for USD45-70 per month in limited areas.

So they are pricey in US scale, but what can you do..

I'm living in a flat with 2Mbps connection that costs me USD9 a month, but that's another story..

_
B

[General Veers]

It's not that cable modems are an expensive luxury. They usually cost around $40 which is reasonable when you compare it to the cost of regular dial-up access plus an extra phone line.

The lack of availability has everything to do with the telecommunications and cable companies.

I have first-hand experience with this. I used to live in Nebraska, where we had cable modems for at least the last 2 years. This Summer I moved to Indiana. What is strange, is that a city the size of Indianapolis (nearly 1,000,000 people) has not a single provider of cable modems anywhere. As a result I've been forced to go back to the old dial-up connection.

I just cannot believe that cable modems are not more widespread. The technology has been available for at least 4 years now, yet much of the country still has no access to it.

It's almost as if half of the country is still building houses out of straw and mud.

[General Veers]

I know, but unfortunately I'm in Bloomington and the company there is Insight.

All the companies tell me that they will have cable modems by the end of the year, but I suspect they were just saying that to get me off the phone so I'd stop asking tough questions.

[Buuri]

Oh, I forgot to ask that what you mean by "cable modem" in US? How fast is a "cable modem"?
Are you talking about leased lines from telephone company (ADSL) or TV cable services?

_
B

[General Veers]

We're talking about the cable modem service usually provided by the cable TV companies. It's provided directly over the cable TV lines, and usually has nothing to do with phone lines.

I'm not sure whether or not it's faster than ADSL. Some people say it is, and some people say it isn't. All I can say is that it's plenty fast for most things, and most people would never go back to dialup after using it.

One reason that cable modems are superior to to ADSL is that unlike ADSL cable modems do not have the relatively low upload speed of ADSL. This translates into a higher "ping" in online games.

[General Veers]

It's probably due to the ancient cable wires used in Indiana. Comcast probably has done nothing to upgrade or replace aging cables for 10-15 years. If the cables into the house are no good, then cable modems won't function properly.

[Buuri]

ADSL lines can be up to something like 6Mbps, depending how much you want to pay for it.
What it comes to upload speeds, they are hundreds of kbps at least so that can't be reason for lag since games don't need much bandwidth at all. (no more than modem speeds)

What makes the difference is the quality of ISP.

_
B

[agallag]

You can't compare DSL to cable without knowing what your particular isp is offering. The theoretical maximum for DSL is up around 50Mbps, where cable tops out around 30Mbps (for now).

In my area (Toronto), the phone company offers DSL at 1Mbps download, 128Kbps upload. The cable company can give us about 2Mbps download and 256-512Kbps upload (on the @Home network), although it is much less reliable bandwidth (it can drop almost to modem speeds in prime time).

I was on cable in my old house, but my new place only has access to DSL. So far, DSL has been better, except for the HTTP Proxy the phone company makes us go through.

In the next couple of weeks, they're changing us over from a straight DHCP based IP assignment to something called "PPP over Ethernet" which will require a custom network client (they say it's so they'll be able to re-sell DSL services to other ISPs). So far, they've only released clients for Win9x, NT, and a beta Linux client. Anyone on W2K, OS/2, BeOS, or anything else is SOL I guess. They will be getting rid of the proxy when they make the change though, which is good.

As long as I don't have to go back to dial-up, I'll be pretty happy

[Wombat]

One other thing of note is that DSL is not shared among households, while cable is. That's why when that one neighbor who was beta-testing the cable talked about how fast it was, then when you got it, it wasn't nearly as fast.