Broadband is the way to the Net

A survey by U.S.-based Pyramid Research in February showed that, in Asia, South Korea had the largest number of people accessing the Internet through broadband services, followed by Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. In January, Shanghai, which aspires to become a telecommunications hub in China, announced its plan to provide broadband services to all of its 13 million population. Ambitious, maybe, but it clearly shows the direction Internet connection will go.

In developed countries, broadband services basically include the cable network and the xDSL (Digital Subscriber Line) services offered by local telephone companies or other service providers that are not really part of the telephone operator. There are also fixed-point wireless services as well as two-way satellite services that provide high-speed broadband connection to the Internet.

The need for broadband services has been growing tremendously. Those who work at home love broadband. Children who play online interactive games and teenagers who swap music files -- legally and illegally -- over the Net also love it. Their parents, of course, love it too because they only have to pay a flat fee every month.

Even if the monthly subscription fee is far higher than what they normally pay the ISP and the telephone company, parents prefer it because of its predictability. At least they would no longer have to remind their children, "You have been online too long, honey."

Broadband is also a must if you plan to connect more than one PC to the Internet using a single account. Broadband will allow your son to play games on his PC and your daughter to chat over the Net while you download pages of online newspapers for your work. Such a proposition would be totally impractical with a dial-up connection.

If you use the old modem, which is tethered to the phone line in your house, to connect to the Internet, you are still using the dial-up connection. It is hard to be efficient with Internet connection when you have a dial-up. If you have an urgent e-mail to respond to, would you disconnect first and prepare your reply, or would you leave the computer connected to the Internet? If you disconnect, you know it will take some time to get reconnected -- with all those handshaking and authentication process. And there is always a chance the ISP's phone line would be busy.

The beauty of broadband services is that your PC is connected to the Internet all the time. There is no need to dial a number, and there is no need to check whether you are still connected when the PC is idle. You can just forget about the connection altogether and act as if the Internet is just next door.

Besides the so-called "always-on" link to the Internet, broadband users also enjoy higher speeds. As opposed to the maximum 53.3 Kbps (kilobit per second) that is theoretically possible with a telephone line connection, a cable connection can reach 1 Mbps (megabit per second) and a DSL connection can max at 2 Mbps. In the case of cable service, because the pipe is shared, you will have a very slow connection if a lot of your neighbors are also downloading streaming audio or video files at the same time.

What about in Jakarta? A growing number of areas are getting the cable network services. ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line)is still not possible because it requires telephone lines of high quality and which are fine tuned for high-speed data transfer -- an infrastructure that our telecom operator simply does not have. Wireless local loop services are also increasingly available, enabling you to connect to the Internet through radio transmitters and receivers. Satellite-based services are also available, and you can connect your PCs through a LAN operated by the building management of your office or apartment that has these connections to the Internet. At any rate, broadband is clearly the way to access the Internet.

-- Zatni Arbi