If the buzz about cable modems with speeds of Warp Factor Nine hasn't got you salivating, don't worry. It's going to be a while before these suckers take their place next to your beloved PC.
That's the picture that emerged last week from the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, California, which was supposed to be the "Western Cable Modem Show." And it was - sort of. Some 15 companies were touting their cable modems. Several even got significant orders from cable TV operators. But few unveiled new products, and the orders were far below the superstar levels gracing at least one other gizmo competing for cable's bucks - digital set-top terminals.
The show delivered some big news for digital set-tops: Scientific-Atlanta nailed a three-year deal to supply 550,000 digital set-tops to Time Warner Cable. And General Instrument Corp. said it has racked up orders from more than 70 cable operators totaling 3.5 million set-top units.
None of the cable modem deals announced last week came close to those numbers. That means most of the almost 65 million cable TV subscribers in the US won't see cable modems for quite some time. But you may be vegging out to the latest digitized episode of Terminator 2 in no time.
That is hardly a consolation for netizens everywhere: Cable modems are ridiculously fast greasers of data that whip precious digital bits at tens of megabits per second downstream.
So to put cable modems in perspective, consider this: One Israeli company, New Media Communication Ltd., unveiled a cable modem at last week's convention that shoots bits down the wire at 56 Mbps. That's damned fast. Now current computer processors max out at around 2 or 3 Mbps, but that's on some shared pipeline to the PC.
These modems aren't perfect. Most are asymmetrical, which means the upstream rates at which you can send data are much slower (some of the cable modems being displayed in Anaheim use the same old telephone line for upstream sending). And there are lingering questions about whether cable operators have worked out all the kinks. But imagine downloading a full-motion video stream almost in real time.
At best, the Western Show produced a speckling of deals. Motorola got an order from Cox Communications Inc. for 50,000 of its "CyberSURFR" modems. And tiny TCA Cable TV Inc. agreed to buy 20,000 of Scientific-Atlanta's "dataXcellerator" modems. All in all, the rash of mini-deals amounted to orders for about 100,000 modems - and that's a pretty small slice of 65 million.
One promising bit of news: Cable Television Laboratories Inc. - a sort of research and development collective for the cable TV industry - said that an industry working group has agreed on a draft standard for high-speed data transmissions, adding some needed certainty to the picture.
The next step is for cable modems to arrive en masse. But don't hold your breath. Meanwhile, that Married With Children.... rerun is on the F/X channel.
