My interest in connecting to the internet over cable rather than telephone lines was piqued last fall when I was reviewing a credit application for Cogeco, which happens to be the cable monopoly in Oakville. At the time I was quite negative about cable modem connections since I had read in the Economist that there were serious technical issues which needed to be resolved before these could deliver on their promises of lightning fast connection speeds. I approved the credit, but I didn't think that Cogeco would achieve anything like the number of cable modem subscribers that they expected.
Over the next several months I did some investigation to find out how much a personal ISDN connection would be. My conclusion: it would increase my connection speeds by a factor of 10 [from 14.4kbs to 128kbs] which is pretty good, but that the cost for this was unreasonable. Then I started reading about new 56kbs modem technology which wouldn't require a dedicated line to be brought into the house. This was much cheaper, but would only speed up my connection by a factor of 4, not enough to get me excited.
Then I began to reconsider the merits of a cable connection. The cable modems used by Cogeco, Rogers and others promised connection speeds of 500kbs; that would improve my connection by nearly a factor of 40. WOW!!! When I went to see a demonstration of the T1 internet connectivity they are planning to give us at the bank, I was convinced...Using the internet with a fast connection is a qualitatively different experience from what I had been doing. I had to have a very fast connection, and I had to have it NOW.
I ordered the WAVE that week, and it was installed the following Saturday. Installation was a breeze, even though they sent a computer geek [excuse me, technician] to install the thing, I could have done it myself. Since my Mac clone already has Ethernet capability built in, all that had to be done was to plug the cable modem into the AC outlet and to a cable outlet, and then plug it through a small adaptor into the ethernet port on my pc. The whole thing took about 10 minutes.
The irritating thing about this is that the technician was about 2 hours behind schedule because the he had spent so much time on what he called "difficult installations". By that he meant installing on Wintel machines where he had to open up the PC to install a special ethernet card, and then fiddle with various .ini and .dll and .exe and .whatever files to get the darn thing running. Installing on my mac allowed him to catch up and get home for his dinner on time.
The really irritating thing is that, not only did I have to pay a technician to do something I could have done myself, but because Mac installations are the exception, I had to pay $50 more for the Mac installation than the other folks paid for their "standard" Wintel installations.
More about WAVE
Home -- Spring '97
Part of Stuart Brannan's website. To see the entire site, click here. This page was last built with Frontier on 19 May 1997 at 3:01:57 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Stuart