Modem

A man walked into a Ritchie Highway computer store Monday morning, tucked a fax machine modem under his coat and walked out, escaping in a 1980 Toyota driven by another person, county police said yesterday.Eric Kilponen, 31, the manager of CompUSA in the 6600 block of Ritchie Highway, told police the man came into the store shortly after 10:30 a.m. and took an Ace fax modem from a display. When the man hid the modem under his coat, Mr. Kilponen asked him to remove it, but the man ran from the store, police said.

It seemed reasonable. My friend said, "It's easy. You just go to Radio Shack, buy a router, plug it in, and you're wireless." I did this. Yet I was not wireless. Now I could not get to the Internet at all. Luckily, there was a phone number for tech support on the box. The people at tech support are wonderfully kind and saintlike in their patience. It beats me how they know what is happening on my computer screen 10,000 miles away, but they do. It's a Mystery. We have to accept it. It turns out I was a bit of a Mystery to them, too, and I spent several hours on the phone with a lovely woman in Chennai named Maya.

A lot of folks who bought computers a couple of years ago are finding that the 2,400-baud modems that came bundled inside aren't up to the demands of today's communications.The major on-line services -- Prodigy, America Online and CompuServe -- all have shiny graphical interfaces that pass a lot of data back and forth.At low speeds, they're maddeningly slow. And older modems are virtually useless for surfing the Internet with graphical World Wide Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape.Luckily, replacing a modem is relatively easy and not all that expensive.

LAS VEGAS -- The next generation of Internet cable modems will let users download a full set of encyclopedias in a few minutes, transfer 75 songs or thousands of photos in a few seconds, or download TV shows and movies in a fraction of the time it takes today. Brian L. Roberts, Comcast Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, predicted yesterday that the new devices will once again revolutionize the television and technology businesses. In the first public demonstration of "wideband" cable modems, Roberts' prototype hit data transfer rates of about 150 megabits per second.

Communicating by phone with a computer is losing its time-honored hacker's mystique.Thousands of kids are logging onto Prodigy to play games. Mom and dad are hooking up with the office computer, checking their electronic mail on MCI and paying their bills online. Salesmen with laptops are filling orders from their customers' desks, thousands of miles from the home office. College students are tapping into the campus mainframe, delivering their term papers electronically.Not surprisingly, there has been a boom in the modem business, as manufacturers turn out gee-whizzz black boxes that not only communicate much faster than the models available a few years ago, but also can turn your PC into a fax machine.

Information Resource Engineering Inc. said yesterday that it has received a patent on its new secure portable modem, a product the company said will promote telecommuting by making it easier for stay-at-home workers to affordably scramble transmissions to their offices."

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. of Baltimore said yesterday that it has completed extensive field testing of its Supercast broadcast modem system, which uses TV signals to broadcast Internet transmissions and other data to computers.Sinclair, which owns Channel 45 in Baltimore and 27 other stations nationally, said the tests show the system can deliver digital data throughout the Baltimore market at speeds almost four times faster than a standard 28.8 kilobytes-per-second telephone modem.The news caused Sinclair's stock to rise $1.875 to $44.50 on trading that doubled the stock's daily average volume over the past three months.

MY FRIEND Richard bought a computer three years ago, and he's still satisfied with it. Or he was until a month ago when he finally decided it was time to surf the Web and signed up with an Internet provider."

ATLANTA -- Karl Turzi has heard them all -- almost every conceivable question about setting up a computer to communicate over telephone lines.That's his job at CompuServe: helping new customers. He deals with the obvious -- folks who forget to plug the computer's modem into a telephone line -- and is equally at home with the esoteric.He agreed to share a few tips that will help you get connected to a bulletin board. Once you've set up your system correctly, you won't have to do it again. These tips apply to all computer communications, not just bulletin boards.

Penril DataComm Networks Inc. said yesterday that it will sell its biggest subsidiary to a California firm for $120 million, and then spin off the rest of the firm as a new company to be called Access Beyond.The news caused the Gaithersburg company's stock to soar $3.625 to $13.625. The stock has risen from a 52-week low of $4.25 reached last June 30, even though Penril lost $7.7 million in fiscal 1995 and lost about $5.5 million in the first half of the year that ends in July.Bay Networks Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.

The first thing Rinaldo J. Bucci does each morning is have his heart monitored for the sort of trouble that landed him in the hospital in January, short of breath and bloated with fluids. But he doesn't have to leave home. In a low-tech application of telemedicine - technology that enables physicians to consult on cases around the globe by computer hookup - Bucci weighs in with a nurse practitioner at the University of Maryland Medical Center from his bedside in Bel Air. It takes less than 15 minutes for the 70-year-old retired engineer to step on a scale, don a blood-pressure cuff and wrap two heart-rhythm sensors around his wrists.

The slow lane on the Information Superhighway is a darn crowded space. Forget the hoopla surrounding high-speed Internet access. Ignore financial headaches at the likes of America Online and Earthlink, two major providers of older and slower telephone-line links to the Web. Relatively ancient communications science, known in the tech trade as "56K," is still surprisingly robust business. Six years have passed since modern electronics ran up against the laws of physics when it came to basic copper telephone lines.

A change in the way federal officials classify cable modem service could cost Carroll County and its municipalities thousands of dollars a month in franchise fees from Adelphia Cable and send the county into a long legal battle with the cable giant. The Federal Communications Commission decided last month that cable modem services are a form of interstate communications rather than a cable or telecommunications service. With the ruling, modem service no longer falls under Adelphia's franchise agreement with the county, the company's attorneys say. Franchise General Manager Teresa Pickett informed the Carroll Cable Commission of the change in a letter dated April 17. Carroll officials, however, say their contract protects the county from losing money because of such a decision, and they promise to fight Adelphia, in court if necessary, to get the full revenue expected from the contract.

A preliminary decision by federal regulators on cable modem franchise fees could deny local governments millions of dollars in revenue that was used to pay for schools, trash collection and other services. Comcast, the cable giant that serves 800,000 customers in Maryland, told county governments recently that it will no longer collect franchise fees from cable modem customers after a March 14 announcement by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC said the fees were meant to be collected on cable television service, not on information utilities such as cable Internet connections.

Do you suffer from modem malaise? Does your 56 kbps Internet connection languish at a paltry 28.8? Are you pulling your hair out waiting for tiny graphics to ripple onto your monitor? Don't fret. You are in good company. Dial-up Internet subscribers vastly outnumber broadband users in the United States, and very smart people are constantly working to find ways to squeeze every last kilobit-per-second out of home computer connections. According to a new survey from Parks Associates of Dallas, Internet connections over standard telephone lines can be remarkably satisfying for the majority of 46 million American dial-up users.

When Kris Stoltenberg opened her AT&T phone bill on New Year's Day, she was shocked to find charges for seven calls totaling $272 from her home computer to the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu. All were to 1-900-numbers for pornography sites and psychic hot lines. Stoltenberg, who lives in Grand Island, Neb., at first accused her husband. He in turn accused her. Soon, they began to suspect their children. Then it occurred to the Stoltenbergs: Their computer wasn't in the house when the supposed calls were made.

Call them pioneers. Call them charitable souls. Call them computer freaks. The president and vice president of an Annapolis computer firm profess to be all three.They say their cutting-edge technology can reach Anne Arundel County's elected officials more efficiently than the average letter, telegram, phone call or facsimile.Even better, Rick Hirschauer, president of United Data Products, and Horton J. McCormick Jr., vice president, say their new electronic bulletin board, Citizen Link, is absolutely free.

For most Internet surfers, the fastest and most affordable access technology is the 56K modem, capable of sending data to your computer at a rate of 56 kilobits per second.56K modems were introduced a year ago with enormous fanfare. But consumers quickly discovered one catch: Because the industry hadn't settled on a technology standard, not every 56K modem would work with every Internet service provider (ISP). Backers of rival X2 and K56flex technologies battled it out for retail shelf space and ISP support, leaving consumers bewildered and reluctant to buy their products.

Buying a computer for the holidays is easy - all it takes is a credit card and a trunk big enough to lug it home. Making sure the PC works when you finally unwrap it takes a little more effort - but it's time well spent if you value domestic tranquility. If you're buying a PC with the intention of opening the box on Christmas morning, the first rule is to plan ahead, and then cheat a little. There's no point in turning what should be a happy family experience into a nightmare while you struggle to assemble an unfamiliar, complex gadget in the presence of impatient children who want to use it right now. If things go wrong, they'll be in tears, your spouse will be furious, and you'll feel like an idiot.

For all the talk these days about broadband Internet connections, you'd think no one visited cyberspace using a plain old telephone modem any more. But, by far, dial-up Web surfers still outnumber high-speed customers, and they have a high-tech advance to cheer in the new millennium. Manufacturers have begun selling analog modems to take advantage of new V.92 technology, an upgrade from V.90, which brought order to chaos in the modem world nearly three years ago. While previous upgrades in dial-up modems brought speedier Internet connections, the International Telecommunications Union, which adopts so-called "V" standards for modems, voted last summer to make life easier for dial-up customers who use a single phone line to surf the Internet and make regular calls.