Cable modem - Secure mail

[Edward Glowacki]

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Marcel Kunath wrote:
> Which makes me wonder. Do all TCI customers have still 10Mb modems? They
> upgraded to 100Mb but are we ever gonna get different modems?

I believe all AT&T (METS and @HOME) modems are bandwidth limited,
except the higher-end METS ones ($90/mo or more).  I doubt they'll
up the level of service too much in the near future, since the only
real competitor is DSL.  For most customers the bandwidth-limited
cable modem is still going to be faster than any DSL service they
can get (I can only get about 400k DSL).  So if you're AT&T, you
limit your rates (at least for residential customers) to around
the same or slightly faster than your competitor.  That way you
can say, "We're the fastest!" and not have to pay for as much
external internet bandwidth, which is very expensive.  And for
probably 97% of home users, even something like 500kbps cable modem
is going to be heaven compared to a 56k modem, and they're not
going to care about having anything faster.  Even if we consider
back just after TCI upgraded their backbone and things were running
real good, the bottleneck was still shared 10Mb, and even with that
I had download speeds that I was actually impressed with, I didn't
*need* anything faster.  Even after they bandwidth limited me, my
connection didn't feel to slow.  All in all, if you've got a cable
modem right now that has reasonably good performance and it's not
costing you an arm and a leg, then be happy.  Be very happy.  From
one who had and now has not, I realize how much I took my cable
modem for granted.

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
Network Services		
Michigan State University