See URL http://www.home.net/home2/speed.html Some tidbits: @Home is a high-speed network that provides real-time multimedia news, information, entertainment and advertising content, access to the Internet, e-mail and other services to consumers via cable systems and their personal computers. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is a joint venture between (between Tele-Communications Inc. and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers )venture capital firm. The @Home network will provide consumers with a significant increase in speed and quality over current online connections. The service will use a customized version of the popular Netscape browser that will run on most Microsoft Windows, Windows 95, Macintosh OS and UNIX personal computers. @Home will employ an open platform architecture that will make its features available to the widest possible number of users and content providers. The @Home network will operate over a high-speed backbone and existing cable systems and will be linked to home computers via cablemodems and standard Ethernet connections. @Home will include a wide variety of content. In addition to providing connections to the global Internet, the World Wide Web and e-mail, the service will enable content providers to create multimedia content that takes advantage of the high-speed network, as well as extensive local news and information. Deployment of the @Home service will begin in 1996 in select national markets, starting with Sunnyvale, Calif. The monthly charge for @Home is expected to be $30-$50 for unlimited use of basic services. ... Cable modems are almost 700 times faster than 14.4 modems and nearly 80 times faster than ISDN connections. Cable modems do not require an extra phone line, and they eliminate the time and potential trouble involved in dialing a service. Cable-based Internet services offer an even richer multimedia experience than CD-ROM technology, including real-time delivery and updating of content. And cable offers a direct connection to the online world--when you turn on the computer, you are on the network. @Home's network is based on a distributed model that makes extensive use of caching and replication to minimize traffic on the system's backbone and maintain high levels of speed. @Home will operate its own global network infrastructure connecting to the Internet at multiple locations. The @Home backbone will connect regional data centers together via a multi-megabit switched data system. These regional centers would serve limited geographic areas, such as individual cities, and would be connected to local servers located at cable system headends. @Home users would be connected to the headends via local area networks operating over the cable system, which is a two-way hybrid fiber-optic/coaxial cable configured asymmetrically. Many cable companies have upgraded their systems to handle such two-way connections or are in the process of doing so. At the home, the service would arrive over the same cable that delivers television signals, which would not be affected by the addition of data services. The cable modem, which would be supplied by the cable company, would be connected to the subscriber's computer with a standard 10-Base-T Ethernet cable. Many computers now include Ethernet connections or can easily be upgraded. The software required to use the service would be provided to the subscriber by @Home and will include a TCP/IP stack and Internet browser software with built-in e-mail and multimedia capabilities.