Modems connect you to the rest of the computing world.
The WWW or World Wide
Web. The WWW is just one gigantic network. Some think of it as a mystical place,
and it is. In some respects it is like having your own personal shopping mall
and wonder land in your home.
There are two main types of modem in use to day.
The dial up modem and the cable/dsl modem.
The dial up uses a phone line, you connect the modem to your computer with one
cable and then connect another cable to your phone line. One draw back of a
dialup connection to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is the speed. Speed
makes the world go round. Another draw back of a dial up connection is if you
have only one phone line, it is blocked while you are using the modem. You also
have to turn off the call waiting and call forwarding features while you are
using the modem. You could work from home with a dial up if your job
did not entail the sending and receiving of large documents. Surfing the net ten
years ago on dial up was not as time consuming as it is today because the web
pages were not loaded up with graphics, video clips, moving advertisements, and
associated junk.
Cable and DSL modems are connected directly to your ISP. Some cable companies use
different types (of network topology) to make it work but it basically boils
down to you are connected directly to the ISP all the time. You want to surf the
net looking for a new computer? You just start up the old one and "go online"
you do not have to wait for a dial up connection.
Different types of modems are:
Dial up (Analog - uses the phone line to connect by dialing a phone number, slow)
DSL (Digital - uses the phone line to connect but does not dial a phone number, is fairly
fast, you are the only one using the line, your private network connection to
the ISP)
Cable (Digital - uses a coax cable to connect, very fast until the number of users exceeds
four, this is because the amount of "band width" is divided up amongst you and
your neighbors, like a highway, four cars will move along at the speed limit,
twenty will cause a traffic jam.
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