If you think about the future, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Well, in the minds of most people the word computer or Internet will come to mind. Since the introduction of PC's in the late seventies and early eighties, the technology involved in computers has grown exponentially.
The internet, which came into widespread use only five or six years ago has grown unimaginably. Anybody can find virtually anything they want over the Internet. The first way to access the internet was through dial up telephone modems brought through ISP's such as Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and many other providers. These providers were slow and sometimes you couldn't even get through the busy phone lines. The phone modem industry has grown greatly since then, but it still has its flaws. ISDN's have become popular in the business world and provide better service than telephone modems, but they also have their flaws. The wave of the future as far as Internet access is concerned is cable modems.
Cable modems are faster, more efficient, more cost efficient and easier to use than any other Internet access that's ever been introduced. WHAT IS A CABLE MODEM? A cable modem is "a device that allows high speed data access (such as to the Internet_ via a cable TV network." In other words rather than running the Internet through the telephone, it will be run through cable TV.

HOW DO CABLE MODEMS WORK?
There are five main components to the operation of cable modems:
1.     The head end
2.     The trunk cable
3.     The distribution cable in the neighborhood
4.     The drop cable to the home and in house wiring
5.     The terminal equipment.

     It's really a fairly simple process. A cable modem network is described as a "tree and branch" network. This means there is a main station (head end that has a trunk cable that distributes feeder cables to all of the neighborhoods. These feeder cables branch off into drop cables that go into the homes of the individuals, where it is then wired to the terminal equipment.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES
There are many advantages to using the modem over a phone modem or an ISDN connection. The first advantage and probably the most popular and important to the average consumer is the speed of the modem. How many times have you found yourself staring at you monitor, waiting for your computer to download a file? Those days are over. A good modem in today's computer is 56Kbps. The cable modems that are being manufactured now range from, at the low end, 500Kbps to, at the high end, 36Mbps. Most of the cable modems being produced right now operate at 1.54Mbps upstream to 10Mbps downstream. Transfer Rate for a 10Mb File:
THE DISADVANTAGES
As you may have assumed and often the case, this method of accessing the Internet creates the bottleneck, when many users just like yourself are sharing the same bandwidth in the neighborhood. Also, it is worth remembering however that some popular sites and the wider Internet connections are often the bottlenecks, and in those cases, many delays will still occur. To explain this better, take the analogy of cars on a Freeway. If you have a high performance car and there is not much traffic on the Freeway, you will be able to have unimpeded high speed travel (not that any of our readers would speed of course). If however the highway is clogged with other cars, it really doesn't matter what the performance or speed of your car is. You will only be able to go as fast as the slowest cars.
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 to look at it overall. It costs around $200 for the modem itself and about $100 to install it. These prices may sound high but when you can pay a monthly rate for unlimited service, you are going to save a lot of money in the long run. This will especially benefit the people in the telecommuting business. Their cost would be approximately three times less than that of an ISBN network of a telephone modem network.

WILL IT CATCH ON?
Will this new technology catch on nationwide as well as telephone modems have? If you ask me and from my personal experience, I would say definitely. These modems will probably catch on at first, to LAN's such as college campuses. These networks will see the greatest advantage in cost. Even if, for an individual user, the cost is a little higher it's worth it. Plus, after a while, just like all other computer hardware, the price will go down. The cable modem is definitely the wave of the future. It's already beginning to catch on in business's around the world and will soon be just another thing that people are expected to have on their computer












Sources

VicomSoft (2001). Cable Access Q&A - Part One. Retrieved November 14, 2001 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.vicomsoft.com/index.html?page=http://www.vicomsoft.com/knowledge/reference/cable.modems.html*track=internal


COX Communications. (2001). Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved November 14, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cox.com/CoxatHome/faq.asp