I have a new best friend, and his name is Vincent. He introduced me to
the Internet — not the utilitarian tool I've used for years to
check the weather and order cat food, but the fun house and freak show.
Vincent brought me broadband — a speedy, always-on connection to
the Net that keeps me up at night and makes me late for work in the
morning. Now that I've got a high-speed link, I'm doing things I never
bothered to when I was stuck dialing in at 56 kilobits per second. Like
downloading songs I'm not even sure I want. When you can grab a
4-megabyte file in four minutes, you can be indiscriminate. (That
explains Don't Pay the Ferryman on my MP3 playlist.)
Vincent is the tech-support guy from my phone company who walked me
through the setup of my Digital Subscriber Line. I chose DSL because Bell Atlantic was
offering it in my neighborhood, and my cable company's alternative
high-speed cable-modem service was not available, and for all I knew
those were my only choices (there are many others; I'll explain later).
Ordering the service was simple — getting it going wasn't.
I spent nearly two hours on the phone with Vincent. It was frustrating.
He kept calling me "ma'am." I had to open up my PC, and I usually don't
like getting that intimate with the machine — I'm a plug-and-play
girl. But let me tell you: it was worth it. For $50 a month, never again
will I have to hear HEE YAAWW ... ponga ponga ... tshtksltsklksh ... every
time I go online. There's no "dialing up" the Net; I launch my browser,
and I'm there. And the speed! I'm connecting at 640K — more than
10 times that of my old modem. Web pages don't load; they blink open.
Images don't seep onto the screen; they pop up. When my brother calls, I
taunt, "Still at 56K? Ha!" And I can taunt while I surf — DSL and
voice service run simultaneously on a single phone line.
I shouldn't be so hard on the guy, though. Everybody talks about why
it's great to have a fast pipe, but less clear is how to get it and whom
to get it from. Yet the market is exploding. Consumers have more choices
than ever, and pretty soon it won't matter if you live in an urban
high-rise or a little house on the prairie — you will be able to
get broadband. Nearly 2 million people in the U.S. already do, and that
number is expected to skyrocket to 18 million by year-end 2003. Here's
how you can be one of them:
PHONE
DSL service is available in most big cities. It might take you a little
while to get up to speed using DSL -- it takes 15 days to process an
order with Bell Atlantic -- but the Baby Bells and third-party providers
are working hard to improve the process.
CABLE
I can't get Roadrunner service in my neighborhood until Fall 2000, so I
crossed the river to Manhattan to see what I was missing. Cable
broadband service is a little cheaper than DSL and getting the service
was faster, but it was hard to tell which was faster.
WIRELESS
There are two wireless alternatives to cables and copper: celestial and
terrestrial. Both are attractive for users in remote areas with no phone
or cable service, but one will likely compete head-to-head with the DSL
and cable modem providers.
And once you've become one of the 12 million people who are expected to upgrade over the next few years, we'll help you protect your computer from hackers, find the best sites for broadband users and set up a home network so the whole family can enjoy the fast, new Web with the following articles.
SECURITY
Having an open connection to the Internet means more chances for hackers
to sneak inside your hard drive and steal your data. Find out how to
protect yourself in a broadband world.
BEST SITES
Say goodbye to drab, static Web pages. A new crop of sites,
designed for high-speed users, brings blazing video and rich sound to
the desktop.
HOME NETWORK
In the days of skinny bandwidth, nobody needed home computer networking.
Now broadband is here. Care to share that video download?
