WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2004

Holiday helping hand
Purchasing the right tech gifts for friends and family is no easy task. That's why I've been teaming up with CNET editors to answer your questions live on our Holiday Countdown Webcast series. The series started last week, but don't sweat it if you missed one. You can watch past Webcasts in our video archive.

We'll be answering your calls through December 17, so get your questions ready and call 1-888/599-CNET from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT. Today's topic is home theater.

Next week's topics are:

• 11/29 Phones and handhelds
• 11/30 Digital music
• 12/1 Televisions
• 12/2 Desktops and notebooks
• 12/3 Digital cameras

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2004

Hello, cable
OK, the Comcast guy just swung by and hooked me up with cable Internet. I made sure he didn't realize he was doing an install for a guy from CNET, and I played fairly dumb about the whole process of this "Internet thing" (you know, kind of like the husbands you see in TV commercials).

My dude was a Comcast Contractor, which means he's a freelancer that Comcast handed a magnetic sign to slap on the door of his Toyota pickup. He shimmied up the pole across the street, clambered around my eaves, then fired everything up. And it worked right off the bat. No hassles. Nice.

I had to do a little monkeying with my router after he left, but that was just a matter of guessing a couple of settings and restarting everything a bunch of times, which is shamefully typical for anything made by the PC industry. Of course, the next thing I wanted to know was how fast the pipe is, so I ran some of the well-known speed tests and started grinning like an idiot.

Bandwidth Place reported a roasting 3.8Mbps downstream speed. DSLReports gave me a strong 3.3Mbps rating, with a rather soft 280Kbps uplink speed. And CNET's Bandwidth Meter proved to be the crazy uncle of the bunch, reporting a rather impossible 7Mbps downstream speed. Maybe it's programmed to stroke employees, who knows.

Regardless, I'm happy with my roughly 13X speed boost. In fact, my uplink is now faster than my DSL used to run period. Now, of course, the Web itself doesn't actually run as fast as this kind of connection. I'd hazard a guess that the aggregate speed of the Web infrastructure is around 200Kbps to 400Kbps, but at least now my connection isn't the choke point. Bottom line: Web sites I visit all the time seem to load roughly twice as fast and file downloads arrive in less time than I have to get bored. Subjective stuff is what matters.

So after a long technical apartheid, during which I segregated cable Internet in my mind as the realm of dorks and praised DSL as the savvy choice, I've made the switch. I'm now one of the people who give cable 61 percent of the broadband market over DSL, and a 6.4 million subscriber lead. And I'm in good company with you, my readers, who make it clear in TalkBack that cable rocks. How come you guys didn't clue me in?

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