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Once they get a taste of accessing the Internet via cable modem, it'll be hard to get your telecommuters and small-office workers excited about 56K bit/sec modems or ISDN. At the same time, you'll be happy with the price of Internet via cable modem service.
That's our take after months of testing MediaOne, Inc.'s MediaOne Express, one of the first commercially available cable Internet offerings. For $49.95 per month, we got a Bay Networks, Inc. LANcity LCPET-2 cable modem and a shared 1.5M bit/sec connection to the Internet.
MediaOne Express is a deal, considering that a basic analog phone line can run you $20 to $25 per month and an account with an Internet service provider adds another $15 to $20.
While the service is a marked improvement over competing Internet access offerings, it's not quite as fast as a T-1 link. That's because, in a manner similar to Ethernet, you're sharing bandwidth with as many as 500 of your neighbors, the maximum number of users MediaOne will put on a single segment.
On the other hand, unlike a typical modem or ISDN terminal adapter, the cable modem is always on and service is nearly always available. Our link appeared to be reasonably solid; there was only one time in five months of testing that it was unavailable when we tried to use...