THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Alacazam! Welcome to the Magical World of Cable Modems : On-line: They’re 15 to 400 times faster than phone modems and really ‘smoke’ on the Internet.
Dana Law used to connect to on-line computer services through a regular 14,400 bits-per-second modem, just like most denizens of cyberspace do. But the 40-year-old magician, who lives in the San Diego area, recently pulled a digital rabbit out of his cable company’s converter box: He’s participating in a test of cable modems, a technology that could redefine the way on-line services are purchased and used in American households.
Cable modems are anywhere from 15 times to 400 times faster than conventional telephone modems, making it possible to view live video clips, for example, or download pictures and software programs in seconds rather than minutes. Law, who is part of a trial being conducted by Cox Cable and Prodigy Services Co., now does his on-line cruising at 500,000 bits-per-second--and he can hardly contain his enthusiasm.
“Surfing the Internet is one of the places where cable modems smoke, especially when you’re downloading pictures and graphics on the World Wide Web,” Law says. “And I’m probably using Prodigy twice as much as I did before the cable modem hookup, and enjoying it much more because it’s faster.”
The potential of this new technology has not been lost on big cable television operators, on-line services providers and modem manufacturers around the country: Almost all of them currently have cable modem tests of some kind under way, and broad deployment of the technology could come as early as year-end.
Of course, there are a few catches. Unlike the phone network, which almost by definition provides a link to anywhere one might want to call, a cable modem in most cases will only connect to services that the cable operator has arranged to make available.
“People may not be able to directly connect to the network at their office, or to America Online,” said David Goodtree, a network analyst for Forrester Research. Cable companies, with limited channel capacity, might be unwilling to carry many different on-line services, though in the long run, many will probably install switching technology that will solve this problem.
And telephone companies have their own solution for high-speed consumer access to on-line services and the Internet: ISDN, or Integrated Services Digital Network, which provides a connection as versatile as a regular phone line and capable of carrying data at up to 112,000 bits per second.
ISDN has been around for more than a decade, but only recently has it become useful and affordable. Pacific Bell recently announced its aim to increase ISDN lines in California from a current 27,000 to a million lines by 1998.
Still, cable modems are much faster than even ISDN, and they have a few other advantages as well. They don’t require an extra phone line, as an ordinary modem might (though a single ISDN connection does offer two separate circuits). And they eliminate the time and potential trouble involved in dialing up a service since they’re directly connected to cable.
The cable companies, eager to find new applications that will help pay for expensive network upgrades, clearly see an opportunity. In addition to Cox--whose San Diego cable modem test includes more than 100 households--major cable operators Tele-Communications Inc., Viacom, Comcast, Rogers, and Cablevision all have cable modem trials under way. TCI has also invested $125 million to acquire 20% of the upcoming Microsoft Network, thus raising the possibility that the Microsoft on-line service could be offered directly to the home over high-speed cable modem links.
Other companies--including on-line service providers such as Prodigy and America Online, software companies like Netscape and Intuit, hardware manufacturers such as Intel and Zenith, and even banks like Wells Fargo--are equally enthusiastic. Steve Walden, director of cable marketing for Prodigy, says the new technology will combine the high-capacity and instant access of CD-ROM multimedia programs with the timeliness of an on-line service.
“Unlike CD-ROM multimedia, which cannot be updated without replacement, we’ll be able to deliver on-line multimedia events in real time with full-motion video and live sound,” he says.
Because no full-scale cable modem services are yet available, pricing remains a murky issue, with estimates of charges for basic service ranging from $5 to $20 per month (compared with $6 to $14 a month for dial-up monthly subscriptions to most on-line services). The modems themselves, which plug into a standard cable converter box and connect to a special add-in board in a personal computer, will typically cost around $300 for most consumers, with high-end models selling for as much as $1,000.
Over time, though, cable modem hardware and services should cost little more than standard phone-based services cost today. The big question is to what extent cable companies will find it in their interest to dedicate valuable channel capacity to on-line computer services--and whether phone companies will reach customers first with high-speed connections.
No one doubts, though, that the traditional analog modem will gradually fall by the wayside as a preferred method of cyber-surfing. People who have gotten used to receiving pictures and videos and sounds instantaneously, rather than waiting endlessly for bits of data to crawl over phone lines, never want to return to the old way.
