Net speeds

A good friend brought this to my attention USAToday reported If you think that today's high-speed Internet connections are fast, wait till you see what cable operators plan. The industry's standard-settings unit, CableLabs, plans to endorse this month technology that will let operators boost speeds 400% to 1,600%, over their existing lines. Motorola and Cisco are among the companies offering alternative methods to increase broadband speeds by linking together the bandwidth used for four or more conventional TV channels.

What would the faster speed bring?

"The sky's the limit," says CableLabs CEO Dick Green. "There are a lot of high-data-rate services lurking out there — including a lot that we haven't even thought of." While cable operators now usually transmit broadband at 3 million bits per second (3MB), a download of "a billion bits per second is completely doable," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the industry's annual convention here this week. "The network could do this quite easily." That could dramatically affect how people use the Internet when the new modems to handle the speeds arrive, which is expected to be in 2008.