[Vaughn Pratt:] Services currently (Spring 1998) being provided are in fact one-directional, with the cable providing the downlink and the up direction being provided by a regular phone line (not ISDN). The cable modem comes on a PCI card and is run by software that runs under Win95. When you want to browse the web you dial up the Cable service (Sun Country in Pala Alto CA), on the line you would normally have used to make 2-way contact with an ISP, and request a dynamically assigned IP address. You can then download from the web at up to 10Mb/s "depending on overall network traffic". Uploading runs at your modem's speed, which might be a fast as 40kb/s.

What I'm hesitating about is the modem-session mentality of this setup. The design seems completely oriented around per-session web-browsing and chatting. For example there is no provision for real-time delivery of email---to find out if you have any email you have to dial up the same way as you would with a regular modem.

What I'm wondering is, is there enough there to get the effect of a dedicated network connection? In particular couldn't one just leave the line dialled up permanently? ISDN pricing makes this prohibitively expensive, but not POTS (plain old telephone service) pricing, which is what is used for the uplink. That way your IP address would remain fixed and presumably the assocation of your hostname with that IP address would make its way out into the world's domain name servers. (They also promise that you get the same IP address for sessions less than 24 hours apart, which makes this premise of a fixed IP address a tad more robust.)[end Pratt]