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Surf the Internet at escape velocity
(Filed: 13/05/1999)
Cable modems MANY people are happy to watch TV, make phone calls and surf the Internet via cable but so far they have not been able to roar down the information superhighway using a cable modem. Only the lucky folks in Kingston-upon-Hull have the chance to use these gadgets, but with luck 1999 should start to see these cable modems appearing in other areas. To get an idea of the difference a cable modem can make we talked to a Belgian cable modem user user. Chello is a broadband service currently available only in Belgium, Holland, Norway and France. But it is expanding rapidly and expects to be ready to take on British customers by the end of the year. The service will cost approximately £100 to install and then F40 (about £25) a month. Belgian user Hans Jenniskens says he, his wife and three children all use the Internet but he says he uses it the most. "For my work I write a lot of reports about all kinds of subjects, lots of the information for them comes from the Net." Jenniskens also plays business simulation games across the Internet. His children use it to download MP3 files, take part in multiplayer games and chat to friends on IRC. The high-speed link is perfect for streaming sound and video clips - very little time is wasted waiting for the data to arrive before it plays. Jenniskens has been using the Internet for several years, so simply having a faster connection has not changed what he uses it for. However, he does use it far more now. Having a fast link means he can move large files around more easily, so much so that he is now happy to exchange detailed engineering drawings with colleagues. He estimates that since the high-speed connection was installed the family is on the Internet for three to four hours a day, and he says that the service has become more reliable in the few months since it started operating. Chello now gives them 2 mb/s regularly - much faster than the ISDN line the family used to use. "We're very spoiled." he says. The big difference with the chello service, and the others in this feature, is that they do not have to be set up by an engineer from the company. If you buy a PC and a modem then chances are that you will be able to connect the modem, install the software and get online yourself. There's no way you could do this with a cable modem service, says Jenniskens: "It's much too difficult for the average user." Best thing: The speed, the fact that it costs the same 24 hours a day and you always get the same performance. Chello charges a flat monthly fee. Worst thing: When you have decided where you want to put your hardware it is impossible to move it without chello's help. Installation: First you need a cable connection. Nearly 12 million homes in Britain have a cable link passing the door but only 3.6 million people have subscribed. Then you need an engineer to fit an Ethernet card into your computer, a cable modem to your cable link, and then get the two talking to each other. Theoretically you should get 10mb/s out of an Ethernet network, in reality you are unlikely to get more than two. Mark Ward ADSL I have seen the future of the Internet, and it is good. Along with 900 other lucky people in selected areas of London, I am taking part in a BT trial of high-speed data services. For £30 a month, I have 2Mbit per second access to the Internet - on paper, 30 times faster than the fastest modem - plus video-on-demand and other services. Best of all, I can stay online for as long as I want with no usage charges, and I don't need a second phone line - with the magic of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), you can squeeze huge amounts of data down an ordinary phone line and talk to someone at the same time. But it's not all a bed of roses. For starters, it took three visits from engineers to get set up (see below). By the time this service works its way on to the high street, however, the next generation technology, ADSL Lite, may be in place so you can install everything yourself (if you have a relatively new PC). Surfing the Internet is a dream with this new setup, but it isn't 30 times better, as you might expect. No matter how fast my connection is, it can still be painfully slow to load far-away Web pages. And though in theory I could view sites full of animations, images and high-resolution video, there aren't many around yet, and they're slow to download, since most sites are designed to be viewed by people using modems, except for the test pages put together for us by BT Interactive and its partners. The video-on-demand available through the trial is hugely impressive compared with the postage-stamp sized clips you get on the Web - when it is working well, the viewable area is around four times larger and almost as sharp as your TV screen. But it still falls short of full TV quality. Possibly the people who benefit most immediately from this trial are game players. For action games, particularly, the faster your connection to the Net, the better the gameplay. Plus, the flat-fee charge for Net access means you can spend hours playing online games without running up a huge bill. In fact, the best single thing about this trial is that it doesn't charge by the minute. Before I signed up, I had to justify to myself every jaunt online I took. I couldn't use the Internet comfortably for chat because I would could always sense the meter was running when I went online. Now I leave my PC on all the time and any time I feel like investigating something on the Net, I do. You don't need new technology for this, just free local calls. Meanwhile, if you are itching to surf at warp speed yourself, you'll have to be patient. BT will not say when it plans to make this service available commercially or what it will charge. Best thing: Downloading anything you like - size no object. Worst thing: Some Internet software doesn't work because BT's service works differently from conventional dial-up Internet. Installation: One engineer had to install a BT line, a second came and made it ADSL (the same line now works as a phone and data line) and then a third installed an Ethernet card and some driver software on my PC and plugged three hardback-sized boxes (a router, a splitter and a modem) into my phone line. In future, with ADSL Lite, you may be able to buy an ADSL modem off the shelf and plug it into your phone socket without any engineer visits. David Brake Satellite The idea behind accessing the Net via a satellite transponder is that media of all types are converging: TV will be on PCs, Internet data will be on television, and there will be no boundaries between movies, music, software and publishing. Most people, though, seem to like having some kind of separation between their various media habits. For Internet users, what the satellite service promises is really fast downloads. Dubbed Convergence1 for its trials, the service was launched in April under the name Easysat for Easynet, with BT, Broadlogic and Eutelsat. New users should expect to spend about £250 or £300 for a satellite dish (you can upgrade an existing Astra dish to receive both Astra and Eutelsat), and a further £49.99 a month or so, depending on which of Easynet's retailers you buy from (see the list at www.easysat.net/). The service sounds complicated, but isn't really. To receive data on your PC, you install a special card (this is where Broadlogic comes in) that performs the same function as the satellite box on top of your TV. Data passes into your computer the same way it would if you were receiving it via an ordinary ISP, except a whole lot faster. To browse the Internet, however, you still need a modem and a phone connection, so your requests for specific pages, files or connections can be processed (Easynet's job). Convergence1's download speed is impressive: video and audio files are noticeably clearer with few jerks and no static, and huge files come down on to your machine at speeds from 70kb/s (about twice that of an ordinary modem) up to 100kb/s. There are some downsides, though. First of all, you can't get away from that expensive phone connection: even an apparently one-way connection as you download a large file in fact requires you to be able to send packets of data back to the originating server, to ensure that the data has come down correctly. If the ideal Net connection is high-bandwidth and cheap enough to be up all the time, this system fails despite its speed. Second, it's an asymmetrical system, so if you need to upload or send large files frequently, you won't gain anything from the increased speed. You couldn't, for example, host a website on a server at home or office economically using this system. Yes, you can receive (they say, up to 60) TV channels broadcasting from Eutelsat on your machine, even when you're not connected, just like your TV. But you couldn't use it to broadcast. The biggest problem for a home user is likely to be technical support, in that the system relies on pieces from several different suppliers. Easynet tends to suggest hardware solutions when often the problem is simply your settings. A lot will depend on how retailers supply and configure the service: the beta tester's experience was that it was not something an average user could install easily and expect to work instantly. Once installed and working, however, it is reliable. It's just that what I want is a flat-rate, high-bandwidth, two-way, 24-hour connection. This hybrid, although a great improvement over the standard dial-up modem, isn't it. Best thing: Download speed. Worst thing: The cost and still having to use the phone line. Installation: You'll need the company engineers' help to get set up: a satellite dish and PC card, plus getting all the pieces to talk to each other. Wendy Grossman
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