been introduced. Another advantage is the imporved service that the cable modem provides over the traditional phone modem. The bandwidth of the cable is 6MHz, which is much larger than that of a telephone modem. This allows more Internet lines to be run through it. Most of the producers of cable modems can ensure that no more than 80% of the lines are being used, and if that much is being used then they can open up more unused lines. This would make it where the user would never get a "busy signal" as you do sometimes with telephone modems. Also the cost of the cable modems, especiall in LAN'S AND WAN's would be much lower. With telephone modems and ISDN connections, consumers are charged for every minute they are online. With a cable modem there is a flat, monthly rate, usually around $40 a month. THE DISADVANTAGES? Are there any disadvantages to this? Well there are a couple of minor disadvantages. Since the network would be a "tree and branch" network, any interference in the network would be combined with all other noise and could make for a noisy connection, and with the large bandwidth of the network there will be a little more noise. However, the producers have done something to fight this. They have developed two main modulation schemes, QAM, which sends data at up to 10Mbps and QPSK, which works at up to 36Mbps. The QAM is more popular right now, because it minimizes the noise produced by the network. While the QPSK is much faster, it is "more robust scheme than higher order modulation techniques in a noisty environment." Also since there are so many different "frequencies" inside the cable, if a noisy connection is detected, it can automatically be switched to one with minimal noise. We may just have to settle for our cable modem being 1000 times faster rather than 3000 times. COSTS? The big question that everyone is going to ask is, how much. How can I get this kind of revolutionary service at a price I can afford? You have t...
