[JDEV] Question about cable modems

[Jay Curry]

While there may be some who consider it to be a silly question, I don't.

Before the internet took off, I ran a bulliten board. There were two
types of bulliten boards that you could set up (though there were dozens
of BBS software packages) Either an always on, or a scheduled BBS.
Scheduled BBS's were really designed for businesses. If you had a phone
line coming into your business, that was otherwise only used during the
work day, setting up a BBS on that line, scheduled for after hours,
would allow you to provide support, and allow your customers to send
messages to each other.

The problem with that idea is the same one you will run into. You are
setting up a service that you hope people will subscribe to, which is
unlikely to be significantly different from services that other people
are setting up. The only thin that will differentiate it is that as long
as you are on a dialup connection, you are going to be less available
than most of the other servers.

This may not be a problem for you. You may just want to set up a Jabber
service that you and your friends at school will use. It only needs to
be up after school till 10 pm, then saturday and sunday from noon till
11 pm. If so, no problem, continue to use the dialup connection.

If you consider this to be a problem, then yes, a CableModem connection
is one option for improving your situation. Another would be a DSL line
if it is available. Other options include Sattelite based connections,
or dedicated direct connections to an ISP. Asside from the advantage of
always on connectivity, the other advantage would be in bandwidth. Any
of these options should give you at least 5 times the bandwidth of a
single 56k dialup connection. 

Hope this helps.

-Rusty

On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 03:53, JAlexa9898 at aol.com wrote:
> If I wanted to configure a Jabber server do you think having a cable modem 
> would be a good place to start if I do not have one? I have a 56K modem right 
> now but I figure if I have a cable modem I can have a 24hour connection. I 
> hope this is  not a silly question and if it is I apologize.