posted 11-23-1999 09:46 AM         

---

Business 2.0 (a new magazine) also says DSL will win out over cable modems. This is from their latest issue:

Cable Modems: Overstated
They drive big mergers involving companies such as AT&T, Excite, and @Home, and have been touted as the savior of peasants toiling under oppressive 56K modems. And they get all the press. But are we getting carried away? Consider: Cable modems use shared bandwidth, meaning that capacity is often shared among hundreds of homes at a time. If you live in a Net-happy neighborhood, that multimegabit-per-second connection can get sliced to a couple hundred kilobits in no time. Installations, meanwhile, are time-consuming and expensive, and cable companies are still trying to iron out numerous kinks such as RF (radio frequency) interference. For now, it's buyer beware.

DSL: Underrated
Digital subscriber lines don't get as much attention as cable modems (and they certainly aren't perfect), but this telco-centric technology is one to watch. The main advantage is that DSL provides a dedicated line, meaning that your bandwidth is yours and yours alone. Granted, you have to be pretty close to a telephone switching center to qualify for service, and twisted pairs of copper aren't the most data-savvy wires around. Still, telcos are making progress faster than expected, doing deals with computer manufacturers, and using their access to millions of existing telephone customers to juice up their marketing efforts. DSL may become quite the dark horse in the fat-pipe stakes.

All times are EST (US)