If you use a cable modem, your first choke point is much closer to you since you share a maximum amount of bandwidth with other users in your neighborhood, which is why your data rate varies.

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Every time it needed to process a credit card, it would use a telephone modem to log into the bank.

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Perhaps hitting closer to home were the comments of Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who told Whitacre in his opening comments how he's shutting off service on a phone line coming into his house and planning to use a cable modem for Internet access.

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Why let one machine have fast access and force the other to use a creeping dialup modem?

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The design, which combines a CPU and modem on a single chip, is more affordable, efficient and compact than systems that use two chips, said Lin.

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To send that information stream over the Net with the kind of modem most people use (one that can handle 28.8 kilobits a second) would take nearly four hours.

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The reading desks, lavishly leather-topped, will be fed books at speed by a computerised retrieval system, and will be equipped for modem and Internet use assets which initially may baffle the older generation of nostalgic pen-pushing scholars.

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Comcast has a data cap of 250 GB for its cable modem customers and a number of ISPs are limiting the amount of data you can use every month.

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