Welcome
to the SiliconValley News & Reviews!
Hardware Reviews
Modems
Analog (phone line) modem users, try this experiment.
Disconnect all the other phones in your house from the wall
sockets and then reconnect to the internet and see how fast the
connection is. Surprised? Don't be. Those wires are all essentially
antennae, and those devices you have connected to the line each
produce line noise. Now, what are you going to do about it? I saw some
heavily insulated modem cables at a Local Discount Store...
U. S. Robotics (3Com)
- No piece of hardware has recently stirred up so much
controversy as USR's X2 technology. People all over the net are
confused and searching for files and information, perhaps because it's
not very easy to locate on their web site. Sportsters have an annoying
flaw where they lock up for no apparent reason and stop transmitting
data. The info on their web site with an ineffective fix to the
problem is now gone. Nice work, guys. After the sloppy move they made
on the market to get the jump on everyone else, causing problems for
the whole industry, I don't think I'll ever buy one of their modems
again.
LAN City -Okay,
so you get set up with MediaOne (which is now MediaOne Roadrunner,
which I assume means they got bought by Warner, just like everyone
else) and they hand you a LAN City LCPET-3 cable modem with a huge
heat sink on it. For the first week it's fast and wonderful and
everyone is happy. Then, for whatever reason, it loses "block
sync" (the connection to the server) and you try everything their
laminated instructions say... to no avail. Sometimes you get block
sync for a little while, then the little lights flash and you can't
get on the net. So, you schedule a MediaOne tech to come out and check
out the problem. They miss several appointments and credit your
account for them, as if they know what your time and the reliability
of your internet connection is worth. Finally they send you a tech...
a cable guy. He says you have the wrong kind of splitter, and
maybe they can do a direct wire into the house for the modem. Well,
that's a lovely throughput issue that doesn't fix the
cable modem problem. Oh, but he's not the PC tech. He can't
replace the cable modem for you. For that you'll have to schedule
something in a week or two. It's just a box, people. It doesn't
take a tech to plug in a box. This same scenario happened to a
friend of mine before it happened to me. If the guy who comes to
the door doesn't have another cable modem in hand, you may as well send
him back to the dispatcher and call them to complain right away. I
don't know how many of these modems fail, but I never had this problem
with my Motorola cable modem back in Austin. If this happens to you
with a LAN City cable modem from MediaOne, just take the damned thing
to their office and swap it out, or just hand it back to them and ask
for a refund, then sign up for ADSL service with someone else instead.
This time it turned out to be a bad power pack.
Lucent -
I have been trying out a Lucent Dual 56k PCI modem. I don't generally
approve of designs like this which increase CPU overhead, but it has
gotten higher connection rates than my last modem did. The biggest
advantage of these modems is that they are available for under $20
now.
Motorola
- You know them for the 68000 series microprocessors that went into
every desktop goodie you could shake a stick at (Amiga, Atari, Sega,
Macintosh, etc.) and you know their pagers. You should also know they
make cable modems. Their programming department is a bit of a mess,
according to a friend of mine who worked their, but the people who
design the hardware are top notch.
Cable Modem Links
Speed Guide
Tim Higgins
Cable
Modem Help
|
