Cable Modems May Get Easier To Install
The Age
Tuesday October 28, 1997
INTEL, At Home, and closely held Cable Television Labs said they're teaming up to design external cable modems for personal computers that users can install themselves, in a bid to boost acceptance of the nascent technology.
The world's largest chipmaker and the two other companies will work to develop the boxes using the so-called universal serial bus, which allows keyboards, monitors and other accessories to plug into a PC interchangeably.
By teaming up, the companies said they hope to speed acceptance of cable modems - which gives users faster access to the Internet than conventional modems attached to phone lines - by making it easier for consumers to set up the service. Now, a customer must have a cable installer or technician open up the PC and install the modem and special devices to make it work.
Interest in the cable industry has heated up recently, with Microsoft making a $1 billion investments in Comcast and discussing a similar investment in Tele-Communications in a bid to extend the software giant's products beyond the computer desktop and into living rooms.
Intel, for its part, owns several hundred thousand shares of At Home, a high-speed Internet access company.
The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker said that by pushing the development of speedy, easier-to-use cable modems, it can help to spur sales of its advanced microprocessors that have multimedia-enhancing technology.
Conventional telephone modems can carry data as fast as 56 kilobits per second, and most consumers have modems limited to 14.4 kb or 28.8 kb.
Cable modems are as fast as 10,000 kb per second.
Intel chips run about 85 per cent of the world's PCs.
© 1997 The Age
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