Its a lot faster than a dial-up modem
Mar 19 '01
The Bottom Line Although it seems obvious to state, cable modems are a lot faster than dial-up modems.
All right, this would be an obvious thing to state, but cable modems are A LOT faster than dial-up modems. How much more? Why? It’s not fair? Darn right it isn’t, but after you see the price of a cable modem, you might just want to stick with a dial-up.
First of all, we need to cover some basics, the kilobytes, kilobits and etc. For some funny reasons, we rate data transfer speed of a communication device by bit rates, instead of the more commonly know bytes. All you really need to know is that 8 bit = 1 byte. And for more funny reasons, the manufactures also decide to market communication devices such as modem in bit rates. Whether or not they are attempting to mislead us into thinking 56 kbps is 56 kilobytes per second or not is another story. But this is a common thing that occurs everywhere, a user comes home and realizes that he’s hardly downloading at 56 kilobytes per second; in fact, he ranges in around 5 kilobytes per second if he’s lucky. What’s going on here? Well if you have been following along, you would know that since the products are advertised in bit rate, 56 kbps means 56 kilobits per second. But wait a minute, according to the calculator, 56,000 divided by 8 equals 7,000. So why aren’t we getting 7 kilobytes per second in our downloads!? Some more factors comes into play, mainly due to the fact that FCC (Federal Commission of Communications) has regulated data transfer rate of phone line to 53kbps, instead of 56kbps. But 53,000 divided by 8 equals 6,625. Why aren’t we getting 6,625 bytes per second? Phone line quality, the Internet Provider’s router quality and the distance comes into play at last, so at the end, our average 56 kbps dial-up modem users reaches speed at about 44,000 bytes per second to 52,000 bytes per second. (If your connection speed rates otherwise, its normally due to driver glitch, in reality, you can never really d/l faster than 53 kilobits per second with dial-up modems without compression.)
Well in the process of explaining bit rates and such, I also covered the speed of dial-up modems too. (pats self on the back) Anyhow, er… back to the real deal, cable modem.
How fast are cable modems? My 3Com External Cable modem (if you want to see what it looks like, check it out here: http://www.3com.com/homeoffice/products/cable_external_features.html ) is capable of up to 3 Mbps of downstream throughput (fancy way of saying download speed) and an upload throughput of 1 Mbps. Remember that this is rated in bits, so if we calculate that, it would be 375 kilobytes per second of download speed, and 125 kilobytes per second of upload speed. For me, a direct download from my service provider's newsgroup server hits about 200-300 kilobytes per second. Pretty darn fast, huh? Of course, as you can see, the actual speed is affected by numerous factors just like a dial-up modem. The coaxial cable line quality will of course come into play, and so does the service provider’s router quality, the amount of switches you have to go through to reach the central router, and at the end, how fast the source of download can upload. (Cant exactly reach super speed if your friend is sending you a video on his 28 kbps modem, no?) So speed may be less than expected, OR, sometimes, the quality is so good that you will actually max out your modem’s capability. If that does happen, you can download about 72 times faster than a 56k dial-up modem. Yes, pretty darn fast indeed. So should you jump out of your sit right now and head to the nearest retail store to grab a cable modem? You should also note that online prices that I found for my cable modem ranges in at $250. Ouch. But have no fear! Since you need an actual cable Internet access provider in the first place, usually the Internet provider also provides the line, and the modem. Many plans such as Roadrunner have free modem included in the service fee, and some other ones allow you to choose the option to ‘rent’ your modem for a fix price per month or year. Though if that’s the case, you are probably better off just shopping on your own for a compatible modem with the service provide for a flat fixed price. (As eventually the rental fee will exceed the original price of the cable modem.) Anyway cable modems are great, my 3Com external modem requires little maintenance, the most I will have to do is to dust it off now and then since I wont be touching it much. It also dispenses little heat if heat is ever an issue anyway, since its external. Requirements for a cable modem is minimum, all you really need is a network card with Ethernet capabilities, and today many computers come with them. Cable modem is another great step toward the eventuality that every Internet user will have broadband access, and as time pass, faster, cheaper, and more efficient cable modems will be produced.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
capyoda
|
|
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 2 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.