Cable Modems Vs. Digital Subscriber :: essays research papers fc

The Internet has grabbed on to the world and it isntletting go. Nearly 36 one million million U.S. homes currently have PCsand bothone is dying to jump on the informationsuperhighway. The Internet, which started as a group ofgovernment agencies and universities, has grown to includealmost anyone, from home lend oneselfrs to macroscopical companies andeveryone in between. It makes sense then that providingInternet service is big business. The service which used tobe dominated by groups of nerdy computer whizzes usingequipment in persons basement is now being provided bymany telephone companies, large on-line services and maysoon be on hand(predicate) from you local cable company.Computer users are an impatient group. They arestarving for a faster way of connecting to the net. Untilnow home users have had to suffer with the slow connectionsavailable with analog modems or spend a relatively largeamount on having a digital line, such as ISDN, installed andthen continue stipendia ry a lot for the monthly chargesassociated with such lines.Standard analog modems have always been hindered by thebandwidth they are allowed to use. Standard voice gradephone lines use the frequency spectrum between 0khz and 4khzto transmit their signal. 33.6 kbps modems packed nearly 11bits of data per hertz, a remarkable feat, which is verynear the theoretical limit. To allow faster connectionsmodems moldiness use a wider bandwidth. Two new competing technologies are now beingdevelopedwhich use this broadband idea to give computer users thespeed they crave. name companies are working ondeveloping a way to use the standard twisted pair copperwires that now connect nearly every home in America totransmit data at high speeds. These technologies,collectively called DSL, come in two main flavors. ADSL,this is an acronym for asymmetric digital reader line,is the most common. This name was coined by Bellcore in1989. The other main type of digital subscriber line iscalled HDSL. It stand s for high-bit-rate digital subscriberline. These two technologies are essentially the same,except they apportion a different bandwidth to upstream(user to meshwork) and downstream (network to user) datatransmission.Concurrently, cable television providers are working ontechnologies to allow them to connect computers to theirnetwork and allow users to connect to the Internet at speedsjust as high. Such equipment is being called a cable modem.Cable modems offer the possibility of transferring dataat rates up to ten megabits per second, a speed nearly tentimes faster than that of ISDN and about twenty times fasterthan todays fastest analog modems. This number is somewhatmisleading however. The truth is that in order to actually