Here's a little update on the state of the diaup industry from our friends at PCWorld.com, enjoy!
Thomas William
# # # #
Virtually every Internet service provider uses dial-up networking to connect individuals to the Internet. Most recognizable are the larger, national information services and ISPs. Companies such as America Online, EarthLink, AT&T WorldNet, and MSN have become household names in the past ten years, and offer nearly universal service in the United States (and often provide international access as well). Each of the big guns offers its own brand of interface, built on dial-up networking, with varying levels of customization and proprietary features.
But there are often a few gotchas if you use an information service's customized interface: Some limit the user's access to Internet resources that are not part of the service's offerings. America Online, for instance, boasts the greatest number of subscribers among ISPs and information services. AOL offers those subscribers a wide range of clubs, user groups, and file libraries. There's so much to do that many AOL subscribers know only how to use those features and services exclusively within AOL's borders, rendering them unable to "leave the nest," so to speak.
On the other hand, more and more subscribers would prefer to use such subscriptions only to connect to the Internet. You can, for instance, simply use AOL as an ISP, but few users do that.
Small ISPs Provide Big Service
Smaller, local ISPs frequently offer more competitive rates, less restrictive interfaces, and a different selection (and usually a higher standard) of service options. "Local," though, doesn't necessarily mean their use is geographically limited. Often they use the same "head-end" network, such as the GRIC Alliance, as the largest providers do, and this can give local ISPs nationwide (or even worldwide) access numbers. EarthLink and MSN, for example, use the same dialing network; so can the little ISPs with big aspirations.
There are free Internet service providers, too, which offer basic connections through their user interface. The trend has been for the free ISPs to serve up a lot of ads in that interface, and little or no tech support if something goes wrong. More recently, these services have begun charging fees for services.
Rosy Future for Dial-Up Networking
Dial-up networking is a mature technology; over the past few years, incremental technology improvements have improved performance, but not by a significant amount. The last major improvement in dial-up was the release of the V.90 standard, which allowed modems that used either of two previously incompatible standards to connect to each other. As a result, most modems are able to connect at or near their rated maximum of 56 kbps.
(The 56-kbps modem specification actually translates to a real-world cap of about 52 kbps, and a realistic maximum throughput averaging about 40 kbps. The quality of the copper phone wire and the phone jack being used, the distance from the user to the phone company's central office, and the Internet's and individual Web sites' level of traffic all factor into the apparent performance.)
A new standard, tentatively named V.92, promises to improve upstream rates by using pulse code modulation, a more efficient method of grabbing and packaging data for transmission. This standard also adds convenience features. With V.92, users who subscribe to a call-waiting service from their phone company will be able to initiate or take a voice call without losing an established data connection to the Internet--long the bane of analog modem users. Another V.92 feature, called QuickConnect, remembers handshake information between your modem and dial-up service, cutting the connection time almost in half.
With new compression technologies on the horizon that promise to improve performance by using a smaller share of the wire to transfer given data, and V.92's convenience features, it looks like the demise of dial-up networking, at least for now, has moved further out on the horizon.
Nathan Garcia is a freelance technology writer based in the San Francisco area and the host of On Computers, a radio call-in show that helps listeners fix computer problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment