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March 13, 1999
News
- America Online and SBC, the parent company of Pac Bell, announced a deal this week that
will enable AOL customers to get high-speed ADSL lines for Internet access, if they live
in an area currently served by Pac Bell. Basically, this deal means that instead of using
Pacific Bell Internet as your ISP, you’ll be able to use AOL. The deal is similar to
one the online service made with an East Coast-based phone company this year. When it
becomes officially available here in the Bay Area, you’ll be able to get the ADSL
download speeds of up to 1.5 Mbits per second for around $42 a month, according to reports
I read, which is even less than the $49 rate that Pac Bell itself charges. An article in
the San Jose Mercury News also suggested that Pac Bell may lower its rates at that time to
match AOL’s, although nothing has been confirmed as of yet.
- With this news, I’m sure there’s bound to be even more interest in the
high-speed ADSL line, so I thought I reiterate some of the basics. First of all, ADSL
works over existing phone lines, and lets you both make and receive regular phone calls
and access the Internet at the same time. The phone line is not at all impacted by the
data portion of the connection and you can add all the normal features, including call
waiting and what have you. ADSL is available in a good percentage of the Bay Area, but
it’s not currently available in all Bay Area cities. Plus, even if it is, your house
has to be within about 3 miles of a phone company central office, or CO, otherwise you
will not be able to get it. The download speed of ADSL typically goes up to about 1.5
Mbps, which translates to just under 200 Kbytes per second, although the fastest I’ve
seen so far is about 135 Kbytes a second. As far as costs are concerned, there is a $199
installation fee that includes an Ethernet card, ADSL modem and the installation of a
splitter device, plus the configuration of your system. The monthly charges are $39 for
the ADSL line, plus $10 more for PacBell Internet. In addition, you have the normal $11
phone charge and any other charges associated with other lines. One final thing to
consider with ADSL is that if you travel and need to have Internet access you’ll also
need to maintain a dial-up account because you can’t take ADSL with you.
- To give you an example of the real-world benefits of ADSL, I downloaded the highest
quality version of the new Star Wars Episode One trailer off the Internet (along with the
required version of QuickTime 3) and in about the time it took to pop a batch of microwave
popcorn—a little less than five minutes—the whole 25 MB file was downloaded.
- Epson has added a new printer to their popular Stylus line of color inkjet printers. The
new Epson Stylus 900, which retails for $449, offers 1,440 x 720 dpi resolution like its
other printers, but operates at much faster speeds than its less-expensive siblings. Epson
is claiming print speeds of up to 12 ppm for black-and-white text pages and around 5-6 ppm
for color pages. The Stylus 900 comes with a USB connector for use with Macs and PCs, as
well as both PC parallel port and Mac serial port connectors.
- In yet another sign that the move towards home networking is moving forward, 3Com and
Microsoft announced that they will be selling a variety of different home networking
products. The companies plan to sell co-branded products that support the Home Phoneline
Networking Association, or HPNA, standard for creating networks over a home’s
existing phone lines, as well as traditional Ethernet-based products. In addition, the two
also plan to provide both wireless and powerline-based home networking kits later in the
year. The initial products will be bundled with computers this summer and sold in retail
this fall. All the products will support at least 10 Mbps, including the phoneline
products, and the Ethernet products will support 10/100 Mbps. Included with the devices
will be some new Windows 98 software including a heretofore unannounced Internet
Connection Sharing feature that sounds like a built-in proxy server feature that Microsoft
must be planning to add to later versions of the OS. The press release about these new
products said that this technology comes from their Universal Plug-n-Play initiative. A
proxy server, by the way, is a piece of software that runs on a computer that’s
attached to a network and to the Internet that allows all the computers on the network to
access the Internet through a single connection and Internet account. This is really handy
for homes with multiple computers and a single high-speed access line such as a cable
modem or ADSL line.
- Another hot topic these days is MP3, or MPEG Layer 3, audio and music being distributed
over the web in MP3 format. Diamond Multimedia sells the Rio MP3 player, which is a
handheld Walkman-like device that can play back MP3 format files. Now, a new UK-based
company has developed an MP3-based car stereo system that they’re claiming can store
up to 35 hours of CD-quality audio. The EmpegCar, which will start at $999 when it ships
later this month, is not only interesting because it’s the first implementation of an
MP3 player device for cars, but also because the system is essentially a computer that
uses the Linux operating system. The EmpegCar features a 200 MHz StrongArm processor and
includes some custom audio circuitry to make it look and function like a high-end stereo.
To find out more, check out the company’s web site at www.empeg.com.
- Iomega has put out a voluntary recall on about 60,000 power supplies for recent Jaz and
Jaz2 removable drives. According to the company, the plastic casing can fall apart, which
could lead to people coming into contact with the power circuitry. To find out if your
drive’s power supply is affected, head over to Iomega.com. In other Iomega news, the
company also announced that they’ve cut the prices on their existing external Zip 100
drives in parallel and SCSI forms to $99. In addition, the USB version of the drive has
been reduced to $129.
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