From couch potato to cybersurfer

摘要

A flaw of the Internet is that most home users lack a highspeed means of using it. A series of articles on competing solutions to this problem starts this week by looking at the efforts of the cable-TV companies. There is something about a computer modem, with its winking lights and noisy squeal of battle with the telephone line's 19th-century analogue technology, that deadens the souls of Internet surfers. With their screens frozen as pages from the World Wide Web trickle slowly down a telephone line, they dream of the day when home computers will be connected straight into the Internet through a fat digital pipe.